Falling into the Vista trap

[Smeggle]

hmm seems my predictions are coming true....

Heres the experience of someone upgrading to Vista...

Microsoft promises to wow people who are upgrading from Windows XP to its new operating system, but with the joys of Windows Vista comes plenty of pain.

I know, I know, I'm a sucker for technology.

The shiny new Vista disk was sitting on my desk, and I just couldn't resist giving it a try.

Even though I fell for Vista's promise - more security and certainly much more fun than tired old Windows XP - I tried not to be stupid.

I knew my four-year-old PC might have trouble coping with Vista, not least because of its wheezing graphics card.

When I bought it, my Dell Dimension 8200 was fairly state-of-the-art (a few stats for the experts: Pentium 4 processor running at 2GHz, 384MB of RAM, a 64MB graphics card, and a Creative SB Live audio card).

Since then I had added memory (to 768MB), a second hard disk, extra USB ports and a Wifi card.

A blunt message

But this was probably not enough, so I downloaded Microsoft's Vista Upgrade Advisor.


Microsoft's message was blunt but useful: Yes, my computer could happily run Vista, but it would need a few crutches and new body parts. Step-by-step instructions told me how to avoid problems:

* Get a new graphics card with at least 128MB memory;
* download new software for the Linksys Wifi network card, to sync my PDA with Outlook and to make good use of my multimedia keyboard;
* download the latest version of my Kaspersky Antivirus software.
* With a few minor exceptions, the rest of my set-up was given a clean bill of health, including my webcam and printer.

It turned out to be tricky to find the right graphics card. Most shopping websites were useless in providing information on Vista compatibility.

At least a dozen times, I discovered in the small print on manufacturers' websites that there were no Vista drivers for that particular piece of hardware. I finally settled on a Nvidia GeForce 6200 with 256MB memory.

Full Story
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I've been reading quite a lot of the same on a lot of techie forums - and don't be fooled by Microsoft - of course there going to try and get you to upgrade thats business....

oh well don't say I never told you so.......