Honestly I feel that the Internet just LOVES hatedoms. If someone were a kid without a PC he wouldn't be arguing about whatever Vista or Netburst is shit or what.

I don't care about "efficiency" honestly. Give me a big, hot, loud PC anyday 😁 . I always had a PC like that, fortunately the performance was always good as well.

No Service Pack 1 or 2? Yuck!

m1so wrote:

Honestly I feel that the Internet just LOVES hatedoms. If someone were a kid without a PC he wouldn't be arguing about whatever Vista or Netburst is shit or what.

I don't care about "efficiency" honestly. Give me a big, hot, loud PC anyday 😁 . I always had a PC like that, fortunately the performance was always good as well.

I agree. This system is quiet when idle and with the Prescott 550 the noise wasnt too bad even during CPU performance tests...
The board tries (successfully) to keep the CPU below 60C so with the Prescott 670 Prime95 makes the system ready for lift off.

Firtasik wrote:

No Service Pack 1 or 2? Yuck!

This system is using the 30 day evaluation period... Im not going to lock a Vista licenece to this board 😀
I have two faster systems I rescued recently with Vista licences so if I feel I need a Vista system after the 30 days I will switch to one of those.

I'm actually surprised that my 5900XT scores higher in WEI under Vista than an R3xx/4xx chip. And equally surprised to hear that it looks choppy in practice; even on FX 5200 it looks fine IME.

Curiosity: where'd you find the extender for the board, and what is it properly called? I have an Asus that could use such a thing, but I've never had luck searching for one.

obobskivich wrote:

I'm actually surprised that my 5900XT scores higher in WEI under Vista than an R3xx/4xx chip. And equally surprised to hear that it looks choppy in practice; even on FX 5200 it looks fine IME.

Curiosity: where'd you find the extender for the board, and what is it properly called? I have an Asus that could use such a thing, but I've never had luck searching for one.

Aero wasnt slow as such and worked OK at 1024*768 but at 1280*1024 Windows turned the Aero feature off as soon as I loaded a program... or moved the mouse too much... Wax on, wax off... Wax on, wax off... This X300 has 128 MB memory on a 64 bit memory bus, its no speed demon thats for sure.

The PCI extender is called a PCI extender I think 😀 Its used so the manufacturer can use the same board both in ATX systems and mATX systems but the boards destined for the mATX systems dosnt usually have the connector for the extender soldered. With luck the connector is standardized but I do not really know for sure, at least all similar(ish) boards made by Asus should use the same connector one would think.

I have no major gripe with Vista. I has some issues but it isn't bad.

But Vista on a P4 runs like poo. Source: I ran it for several months on a P4 with 2 GB of RAM and it sucked
The board died and I replaced the OEM board with a Asrock 775 board with the same CPU and upgraded the RAM to 3 GB. Slightly better but still sucked. And the fan would spin up so easily.

I finally got a Core 2 Duo and it was like heaven. Everything is responsive, quick and it handled
pretty much everything I could throw at it. And the fan would hardly ever spin up with the same HSF

Now I upgraded it to a C2Q Q9550 and it runs great. I will be upgrading the video card really soon.

I am still using Vista and socket 775 as a main system without issues but P4 ... just no.

--posted on my 486

We used to share a vista laptop, it was slow and by the time it died there were keys missing and the dvd drives faceplate was gone, etc. That dell was built like a friggin tank.

I think the big issue with Vista performance was the "Vista ready" stickers that were on many machines that were evidently not ready at all. A lot of those machines could have as little as 512MB of RAM. Easily upgraded, but most people, sorta just expected it to work out of the box because the sticker said it would.

A while ago, out of curiosity I tried Windows 7(32bit) (not quite Vista, I know) on my upgraded Dell Dimension 4600, it ran, but it was sluggish. But keep in mind that this computer had 3.2 GB of RAM visible, a Pentium 4 Extreme (3.2ghz), one of those 10k rpm velociraptor hard drives, and an HD4670 (agp). I didn't think it would be that bad, especially with all the upgrades, but that machine, is now XP permanently.

Granted, that machine was a generation off in regards to the DDR Ram and the socket 478 cpu compared to yours. But mine was manufactured around 2004ish, if the previous owner had tried to run Vista or Seven on that machine with all the stock parts it would have been a nightmare.

I actually used Vista as my main OS back in the day. I "force" myself to stay on the current version of Windows, and even though everyone ditched Vista back in the day, it was actually quite decent. Of course, before I added another GB to my Pentium D (so it had 2GB in total) it crawled horribly, especially because I decided to go all out with a 64-bit version. This system is still up and running, loaned to my brother and acting as his main system, but I changed the Pentium D 920 to a Core2 Duo E6600 and it runs Windows 7 quite well. It did have a semi-decent 8600 GT (now a GTS 450), as the S3 Unichrome managed to lag on XP's UI even when that PC was new.

zstandig wrote:

I think the big issue with Vista performance was the "Vista ready" stickers that were on many machines that were evidently not ready at all. A lot of those machines could have as little as 512MB of RAM. Easily upgraded, but most people, sorta just expected it to work out of the box because the sticker said it would.

My mother had one of those (512MB)... In the end I just downgraded it, added another GB and it ran like a dream.

My guess is that, while Vista truly needed 1GB just like 7 and 8, that amount was way above what manufacturers were equipping OEM systems with... so they just lowered the "Vista ready" specs so it could actually sell to OEMs. It is interesting how Windows memory requirements haven't increased in the past seven years through three versions. The fact that they basically re-built a lot of stuff from the ground up and didn't have enough time to optimize didn't help either.

My guess is that, while Vista truly needed 1GB just like 7 and 8, that amount was way above what manufacturers were equipping OEM systems with... so they just lowered the "Vista ready" specs so it could actually sell to OEMs. It is interesting how Windows memory requirements haven't increased in the past seven years through three versions. The fact that they basically re-built a lot of stuff from the ground up and didn't have enough time to optimize didn't help either.

^ This

And the 512MB machines is one of the big reasons Vista got such a bad rep.
I got ahold of a Vista laptop with 512MB of RAM and it was UNUSABLE

Anything you would try to do would lead to swapping. And it would literally take longer
to boot than my 486 running W2K. Worst machine out of the box I have ever used.

I upgraded the RAM to 1.5GB and it became tolerable.

--still posting from my 486

Interesting setup! I run Vista and a Prescott though not together: vista is great on a phenom ii and the prescott is good with xp/2000. Hate against either of them seems a bit needless.

alexanrs wrote:

My guess is that, while Vista truly needed 1GB just like 7 and 8, that amount was way above what manufacturers were equipping OEM systems with... so they just lowered the "Vista ready" specs so it could actually sell to OEMs. It is interesting how Windows memory requirements haven't increased in the past seven years through three versions. The fact that they basically re-built a lot of stuff from the ground up and didn't have enough time to optimize didn't help either.

Nope, Vista needs 1.5 GB to run half decently. With Windows 7, the memory requirements actually dropped significantly, so Windows is usable on a netbook with 1 GB with no upgrade option.

Microsoft took the criticism to heart and worked on optimisation from Vista to 7.

Afaik, Vista (at least with SP2) is at least as enjoyable as 7

oerk wrote:

Nope, Vista needs 1.5 GB to run half decently. With Windows 7, the memory requirements actually dropped significantly, so Windows is usable on a netbook with 1 GB with no upgrade option.

Microsoft took the criticism to heart and worked on optimisation from Vista to 7.

Oooh.. but you forget the almighty ReadyBoost!!! The disk cache that many people believed turned old USB sticks into RAM. 🤣

To be fair, ReadyBoost is a competent cache. But the amount of illiterate advice about it I've seen on the internet was hilarious.

alexanrs wrote:

oerk wrote:

Nope, Vista needs 1.5 GB to run half decently. With Windows 7, the memory requirements actually dropped significantly, so Windows is usable on a netbook with 1 GB with no upgrade option.

Microsoft took the criticism to heart and worked on optimisation from Vista to 7.

Oooh.. but you forget the almighty ReadyBoost!!! The disk cache that many people believed turned old USB sticks into RAM. 🤣

To be fair, ReadyBoost is a competent cache. But the amount of illiterate advice about it I've seen on the internet was hilarious.

Readyboost never helped much though USB 2. Even the slowest hard disk of the modern era should be faster than USB 2.0

smeezekitty wrote:

Readyboost never helped much though USB 2. Even the slowest hard disk of the modern era should be faster than USB 2.0

The point isn't bandwidth, it's latency. It's a "predictive" cache; Sandisk used to sell a small SSD that did the same thing, but with buggier software. The idea is that it duplicates data from the physical disk(s) on a flash device that offers lower access time. I've got my main Windows 7 system setup with 2 devices (remember that Vista can only use a single flash device; 7 can use up to eight) and it noticeably improves Photoshop and similar application start-up times, even though each one is only around 30MB/s. That said, it's hard to benchmark something like Readyboost (or the Sandisk solution) - you have to remember that none of this stuff will affect computationally bound tasks (just like an SSD won't), and that it can only offer a benefit in certain circumstances.

I use a Class10 card I had laying arround with my laptop, seems to help during startup a little (slow HDD). Again, it is hard to measure, and once things are cached in RAM it isn't very useful until you are memory starved.

I wonder if using ReadyBoost with a small/oldish SSD would yeld results simillar to Intel Rapid Response or Sandisk's SSD Cache

A Netburst-based Vista rig... 🤣 It's like it's 2007 again.

Windows 7 doesn't run so bad on Netburst though. I was once given an old HP P4 with only 1GB of RAM and onboard graphics, and Win7 seemed to be OK on it. It had other issues though, mainly related to malware and a half-assed upgrade from Vista that left some remnants behind. If it were my rig originally, I would have just stuck with XP.

I have not done much more with the system but I used it last night for playing Youtube stuff while surfing on my main rig.
I did also test if the Pentium 4 could handle Firefox with 20+ tabs open. It did just fine but I am using Adblock.
On some of the images you can see the icon for the Unigine Tropics benchmark, it runs perfectly using DX10 at 1280*1024 with max quality and 8xAA.

No performance issues so far but I do have 4 GB (3.2) memory. If someone uses a P4 with Vista today I find it likely they have at least 2 GB memory which seems enough, I put the extra 2 GB in just because... why not.