About three years ago, my aunt was looking for a desktop PC at home that she could use for basic browsing and simple office related work (Word, checking e-mails, etc.).
So, as a fun project, I decided to install Vista (with Service Pack 2 and the Platform Updates) on the following hardware:
- AMD Athlon XP 2000+
- Gigabyte GA-7VRX motherboard (VIA KT333 chipset - probably one of the few chipset manufacturers that actually continued to provide driver support for their older chipsets on Vista)
- 1 GB of RAM (anything less doesn't achieve acceptable performance)
- AMD (ATI) Radeon X800
It ran surprisingly well with Vista for someone just looking for a basic PC. So, I decided to leave it like that and the PC is still running Vista 🤣
However, I will probably have to upgrade that PC to Windows 7, due to Vista's support ending in April 2017.
As already mentioned by some other users in this thread, at first I wasn't impressed by the UAC and Vista's poor driver support. If you had an existing XP PC with a too old motherboard (think NForce 1 or 2 chipset), too old graphics card or too old sound card, you were basically screwed. And, it's memory requirements were also much higher than what the "average" PC of the day was still running on.
However, looking back now and with some later hardware, it's not a too bad of an OS and I kind of like the Aero themes. But, when Windows 7 was released, it kind of grew on me much faster than Vista did, so there was never any reason for me to fall back onto Vista.