Donald's Profile

Member since August 12, 2006

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    Donald McDaniel

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  1. Comment - Microsoft: Vista RC1 Coming Soon

    (Aug 12, 2006 - 1:49 PM)

    Your combination will do a basic installation of Vista, but might not include the Aero portion (because of the CPU speed).
    Basically, it will probably look and run much like XP looks and runs today on similar hardware.

    Performance upgrades will be highly hardware-and-memory dependent. The better hardware and more memory in the box, the better its performance will be. Last 2 years' hardware will be sufficient to get XP-level performance (or higher), but not much better. Load up on memory is the best advice I can give.

    To use Vista to its fullest,
    MORE MEMORY (minimum of 2GB) [512MB is the VERY LEAST, and will result in an XP-level OS],
    MONDO-GONZO VIDEO card (minimum of 128MB Graphics memory, 256MB would be better, DirectX9-capable or better -- With more system memory, this will get you a decent, "snappy" Aero desktop)
    FASTER CPU (preferrably dual-core or 64bit)
    Very recent MOTHERBOARD
    PCI-X
    SATA HD (at least 250GB)
    DUAL-LAYER DVD (8x),
    BROADBAND connection (minimum of 1 mip, better with 6mips -- might as well say goodbye to analog modems, just not sufficient to the task anymore).

    Example: The Beta 2 iso was 2+GB. This is simply not manageable on a 44k connection, and will more than probably result in a bad iso because of the many starts and stops necessary to complete the download.

    If your IP is handled via DHCP, you will have to pause the download every 24hrs to renew your IP. I really advise a 1.5mips (at minimum) broadband connection very highly, as does Microsoft.

    Burn the iso at very low speed (1x-4x), whether you download via 44k or Broadband.

    Just to install you MUST have at least 25GB free disk space. Once Vista is installed, 12GB are necessary just for the OS to live (not counting space necessary for applications and data). SATA HDs are very cheap. Go for at least 250GB, if you can swing it.

    Hope this helps.

    Don

  2. Comment - Microsoft: Vista RC1 Coming Soon

    (Aug 12, 2006 - 1:10 PM)

    I've never seen a Windows Beta cycle go further than Release Candidate 2 (XP) before going RTM, so I surely doubt that there will be an RC3.

    There will surely be milestone betas between RC2 and RTM, but those will only be released to MSDN and Technet subscribers, or in-house.