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Windows Vista Capable or Windows Vista Weakling?
Saturday, July 8th, 2006
We test three different retail computer systems sporting the “Windows Vista Capable” badges
and tell you if it’s a gimmick to move systems or if you can really expect an acceptable user experience. We even throw in a bit of a preview of Vista’s features as well.
If you haven’t heard, Windows Vista will be the next major Windows operating system to come out of Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corporation. Vista brings all sorts of visual and interface enhancements (not to mention the “behind-the-scenes” stuff like DirectX 10) that are shaping up to require quite a bit more hardware muscle to power. Indeed, the minimum specifications are much beefier than those for Windows XP. In particular, the new “Aero” graphical user interface will require the power of a modern DirectX 9 video card with 128MB of RAM. Those wanting to run at very high resolutions will have to have a video card with 256MB of RAM.
But beyond that, Vista requires a lot of hard disk space, and eats up RAM like there’s no tomorrow. We wanted to see if our timid, low-end systems would be capable of running Vista out of the box, and what a typical computer user could expect out of the experience. Given that our systems have older-interfacing IDE drives, integrated graphics, and the minimum amount of RAM, we wanted to see if Windows Vista Capable really meant Widows Vista Weakling. [H] Consumer - Windows Vista Capable or Windows Vista Weakling?
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