Rethinking the 1520 and Vista

I have had my 1520 since November - and I have never been completely happy with it. It has a beautiful (1440x900) LCD, and runs well for surfing and that sort of thing. I kept the original Dell Vista build on it, installed XP, and set it up as a dual-booter. But, even with the 8600GT, my favorite game (SWAT 4) has been choppy on some levels, and the sound stutters in XP and it has static and noise from the headphone jacks. Fast forward to the past two days, I decided to rebuild it from scratch, starting with XP then Vista. Then I re-installed SWAT 4 - but it was the same bad news as before. So, last night, I decided to install SWAT 4 on Vista and give Vista a chance - and, wow, what a difference!! No choppiness at all - very smooth on the three levels I have tried so far. I noticed that Vista allocated 1279-Mb of RAM to the 8600 - which isn't a problem because it has 3-Gb of RAM. And even better news, the sound works great in Vista - no stuttering and no noise or static from the headphone jack. I have not been a Vista fan up until this point, but I have to admit I haven't given it a fair chance. I will continue to (as long as I can find drivers anyway) set up all of my systems as dual-booters with XP, but I am now very happy with Vista and my 1520....

 

If every one were like you and would give vista an honest chance, there would be a lot less people using xp.

 

I have to agree - and it sounds like SP1 may bring some improvements to Vista. I have been thinking about selling my 1520 to get some $$ towards a 1530 - but now I'm going to hold off until later this year. Plus, I'm not sure the grainy-LCD issue for 1530's has been resolved.

 

I run Vista as my main OS all my machines except my work computer and my servers.

 

Its all about the drivers. People like to forget that it was this way when XP first came out (and even 95). Vista > XP. Period.

 

I currently use XP, but I'll admit that Vista is a good OS. There's some kinks, but nothing major.

Can you see Stereo Mix in the audio control panel yet?

 

I hadn't used Vista until this year and aside from the "nag" security pop-ups, was pleasantly surprised. I found it to be quicker and more responsive than XP when loading programs as well as when starting up and shutting down. I have yet to try Vista on any demanding games, I like the driving and flying ones, but have not heard any complaints. Still...XP has been faithful and trustworthy and helped to wash away the nasty taste of Windows ME.