Anandtech's In Depth Review of Vista

Anandtech just posted their indepth review of the final version of Vista (not RC2, not RTM). 21 pages of pure joy or pure terror. Your choice! (Sure, that's maybe too dramatic, but it seems to bring out strong feelings!)

Anandtech Vista Review.

 

On a laptop, at least from what I've been reading. I don't think you'll see any significant difference. In fact, it's likely that your going to run even slower. I just finished reading up on AnandTech's review of Vista, and they say that 1 Gig is the bare minimum to run Vista, with Vista easily consuming half of those resources for the system alone.

Vista only saw significant gains when running with 3 Gigs of memory, it was actually quite remarkable. The guys at AnandTech even say that small apps like Outlook, Winamp, WMP and MSN, boot up as if they were never even closed at all. Booting and shutting down multiple apps took only seconds. Bare in mind, these significant changes only came around when 3 Gigs of memory was installed.

From the review, I'm less likely to upgrade to Vista, at least until I can get 3 Gigs on a laptop, which I currently can't in my system. I'd also want to have at least 256 Megs of dedicated Graphics Memory. Gaming is another main problem on Vista, as it has yet been able to take advantage of the new technology. You'll have to wait for new Vista Drivers for your Graphics card.

I currently use a Fujitsu Lifebook N6010, with 2 Gigs of Memory running XP Pro, and I'm really itching to buy Vista and run it. But after the article, it's now higly unlikely. At least until I can get my hands on an Asus A8JS!!

 

What is this, no mention of drm I see?

In the way that people are going crazy about it?

Could it be? That people who actually use Vista find that most of what people are saying isn't true?

 

Personally I dont think Vista is that bad. I currently only have 2gigs of ram in my system and can tell a difference in apps opening and closing. I started to read that article and quit before the first page was completed because of the fact they state how annoying the user account security features are and how they hated that you have to answer the same question a few times to do anything. Well why didnt they just turn it off? I did and now im not annoyed by it. Either way. Other than a few minor tweaks here and there that need to take place and im sure bugs I havent seen yet Vista isnt all that bad.

 

Regarding UAC, I would find it highly annoying every time I opened a program that wasn't yet "Vista ready". But they do mention that it can be turned off further into the review. It wasn't a "how to" as much as their take on the final release of Vista. Their point being that for non-power users (folks who might not figure out how to turn it off), the UAC might be self-defeating. I liked what they said here:

Regarding DRM and OS's, while DRM is important to a lot of people, it's not really that big a deal to many others. Again, it wasn't a how to guide, but a review of the OS as it performs as an OS. Not everything needs to be an argument.

I thought the comparisons between XP, Vista, and Vista 64 were interesting, as well as the info/comparisons on graphics.

In all, Anand did a good review of the highlights of the final version and touched on a lot of good information. I'll admit that the one thing that is intriguing is SuperFetch - RAM being used to learn your habits so that apps you use frequently load more quickly. Apparently, it works best if your work habits are predictable, but it seemed to make a difference in their testing.

He said that there were plenty of other things to look at and some developments down the road (especially with GPUs) that they'll report on.

 

It's a very thorough review, most of the highlighted points are true to the 64bit Vista Enterprise I have installed, although I would really need to install the 32bit version to test out their theory that the 64bit is "slower".

 

wow see the article below that?
PC-10000RAM (mind you it is basically their pc-8888 with lower timings and performs roughly the same)

 

UAC is not a problem for me. It did surprised me a bit at first. But so did the security ballons on XP.

 

Here's another, slightly more provocative rundown:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=37394
(Of course, this is the inq, which means it should be taken with a grain of salt)

 

Seems more of criticizing the Vista AD than actually criticizing Vista itself as an OS.

But MS does bank on the "Dummy factor". LOL

 

What the heck is this guy talking about, seems more of a rant against MS than any useful feedback on Vista. My mem usage stays the nearly the same with or without my sidebar. Also, I don't know why he didn't just use -10/3 instead of -9.9999999/3, he could have saved a few bits by rounding up.

 

true, but among all that, he has a few valid points too. (Why, when they finally make a good search utility, don't they put it in the taskbar itself, rather than in the start menu where you have to click to access it? And their "control panel search" is only necessary because they've crippled access to the control panel the "old" way. Under XP, you just had to click on the icon that represented what you wanted to do)

You're right though, a lot of it is just ranting, and a lot of it is more about MS than Vista.

 

I guess I should have expected it coming from the Inq but the guy obviously did not have a Windows key on his keyboard...or he just didn't bother to find out (pun intended). Anyhow, Win+f brings up a search form that you can pretty much search anything to your heart's desire, in real time. If anything, he should be criticizing how MS's more aggressive indexing service might adversely affect performance on older machines. Anyhow, yeah the I guess I should have seen your warning about taking the article with a grain of salt.

 

Windows key or no, I think his point was that if they'd placed it in the taskbar rather than in the start menu, you wouldn't need to press even that one key to access it.

 

Course, if they did that they guy would probably rant about how the taskbar is too cluttered.

 

lol, possibly. Still, they could allow it as an option. I usually expand my taskbar to two rows, which means I always have wasted time directly under the start menu, for example. But yeah, I'm not denying it's a bit of a ranty... er, rant...