Windows Vista

I just ordered a new Dell XPS 410 yesterday with vista. I will let you know how it turns out..I have read good and bad reports so we will see.

Hidden Costs of a Windows Vista Upgrade

The shiny, new Windows Vista beckons, and an upgrade is mighty tempting. But before you take the plunge, be aware that you may end up forking out a lot more money than just the cost of an operating system upgrade. Here are 15 reasons to upgrade and here are 6 on why you should wait on Vista.

A lot more than just cash is on the line as well, because you may also spend plenty of time upgrading your hardware to make sure it's Vista-ready. Read on before you upgrade; being forewarned is being forearmed.

The High Cost of Hardware

If you're upgrading to Windows Vista, the first cash outlay you likely face is buying more RAM for your PC. Microsoft says that you can run Windows Vista with 512 megabytes of RAM, but don't believe it. It's simply not worth running Windows Vista on a machine with less than 1 gigabyte of RAM. In fact, you'd be a lot happier with 2GB.

How much will that much RAM cost you? Figure that you can get 1GB of RAM for as low as a little over $100, while 2GB will run you $180 and up.

Even if you have enough RAM, your existing graphics card may not be up to snuff, because Vista is graphics-hungry. If you want to run its Aero environment, you'll need a good graphics card.

There are two levels of Vista hardware compatibility: "Vista Capable," and "Vista Premium Ready." Forget Vista Capable; it won't run Aero, and if you can't run Aero, you shouldn't bother upgrading to Windows Vista.


So you need a graphics card that is Vista Premium Ready. To be Premium Ready, a PC needs a graphics card with support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, a minimum of 128MB of graphics memory, and what's called Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel. There's no room in this story to delve into each of these specs, but the key is the support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, and a minimum of 128MB of graphics memory. Before buying a card, check the box or the manufacturer's site, and make that it matches these specs.

How much will such a card cost? It depends on how much graphics oomph you want. You can get a graphics card that meets these specs for as low as about $60. If you want better performance, of course, you can pay more, in the $100 to $150 range. But with graphics cards, the sky is the limit, and you can spend just about as much as you want until your pocketbook screams. As a practical matter, though, only gamers need the more expensive graphics cards; you don't need them merely to run Vista.

If you don't have a DVD drive, you'll need one, because Vista installs only via DVD. These days DVD drives are cheap; you can get a reasonable one for as low as about $30 to $40.

How about your hard disk? You should have a hard drive with a least a 40GB capacity, with 15GB of free disk space. But you'll certainly want a much bigger drive than that, to leave plenty of room for files and media. So you might need to add a new hard drive. Hard drives are cheap these days; for as low as $70 or $80, you can get one with a 250GB capacity.

How much will all of this cost you? Depending on what you need to install, you can get by with as little as spending only about $60 for a new graphics card, or up to $400 or more if you need to upgrade your RAM, graphics card, and hard disk, and also have to buy a DVD drive.

What's Your Time Worth?
You'll be spending more than just money if you upgrade to Windows Vista, of course--you may spend plenty of time as well. If you need to upgrade your hardware, count in the time it takes to do the upgrade. If you only need to upgrade your RAM, and all goes well during installation, you should need to spend only about 15 minutes. On the other hand, graphics card upgrades can sometimes be tricky, as can hard disk and DVD installations. If things go badly, you can spend hours troubleshooting and listening to bad music while you're on hold on tech support lines.

Finally, consider the time you'll spend upgrading to Windows Vista itself. Microsoft has done an excellent job with the Windows Vista installation process, and it's far easier and faster than previous Windows installs. So if you're going to merely upgrade over your existing version of Windows XP, it may take as little as 40 minutes with very little intervention on your part.

You may, though, opt instead for a clean install, which means that you'll wipe your hard disk clean, and then install Windows Vista. If you do that, you'll have to copy your data somewhere, and then after Vista installs, copy it back to your PC. And you'll also have to reinstall all your applications. This can take multiple hours if your PC has an extensive set of software.

The Bottom Line
So what's the bottom line for hidden upgrade costs? If you've got a relatively new system and opt to upgrade Vista over XP instead of doing a clean install, you may get away with not having to upgrade any hardware, or just need to add some RAM or a new graphics card. That won't put much bite on your pocketbook, and you won't lose your weekends, either.

On the other hand, if you need to do heavy-duty installation work and opt for a clean install, make sure you've got plenty of time--and cash as well.

Those buying the low $$ machines at the discount retailers are going to be severely disappointed with the new OS.

As the article starbuck posted says, it is a very memory intensive OS. I've played with it on machines with 512MB of RAM and it is a bear. The days of skimping on RAM and graphics rendering with Windows based machines are over.

bump... anyone have this yet? mine will be in the mail on Monday?

It looks appealing but I've just been using a Windows Vista skin on my PC to be honest. [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] (Look up: Windows Vista Transformation pack - looks/sounds similar to Vista, only minus a few of the features such as transparent windows).

I'm still holding off on Vista because I'm still hearing about problems with playing certain PC games and with certain hardware. I may be mistaken (correct me if I'm wrong), but I've also heard that a lot of the effects you get with an Audigy soundcard are actually not able to be used in Windows Vista, leaving you stuck with onboard audio for the time being. This sucks!

Anyhow, hope you enjoy it .. it's a neat operating system but I'm afraid it still needs plenty of work. It does have many cool features (such as the calendar, 3d view, etc.) that are fairly difficult to find for XP, though. [img]/LDPforum/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img] If you aren't a hardcore PC gamer or anything like that, I'm sure you'll enjoy it just fine.

I use my PC for just school mainly
so it should be good

I just upgraded my home pc and had no option from the vendor (and most others as far as I can tell), but to get some flavor of Vista. It is 'pretty' no doubt, but the UI is taking a bit of getting used to. The new 'tree-structure' menu system is nice, but somethings that I used to do very easily, i.e., some dragging and dropping tasks are a little more difficult now because the UI seems a bit imprecise (aligning the cursor with the intended destination icon, but I guess this could be just me). And, my old Visioneer 8900 scanner is no longer compatible -- no Vista drivers available and probably none forthcoming.

I read an article the other day about a scientist that studies the usability of OSes and their UIs (User Interfaces). He says that Vista is actually a step backwards in user friendliness and usability from XP. The article outlined the way he conducted studies comparing how much time to took to complete similar tasks between Vista, XP and Max OS X. It is actually a measurable exercise.

Mac was the best by far, followed by XP and then Vista. He admitted that you could tweak Vista to be similar to the XP interface enough to get them close, but still not the same.

Anyway, I agree that Vista still seems a work in progress and I'm impatiently awaiting the first service pack to become available.

Vista sucks. It takes up too much memory.

I'll have to agree with you on that point. That's why I got 3GB on my new system and it runs pretty good. My graphics card isn't the best, but it does fine for now. If I upgrade it sometime in the future, then I should see a considerable performance boost.

Its on my computer now and soo far I have no problem with it at all.. I like it pretty welll