Experiment: Vista on an old PC.

Journal Yaztromo's Journal: Experiment: Vista on an old PC. 2

Journal by Yaztromo on Tuesday January 23, 2007 @11:54PM

Well, my University's MSDN Academic Alliance finally put Vista available for download the other day, so I grabbed a license, downloaded the Business Edition DVD, and will be installing it later tonight. The catch? I'm a Mac guy, but do still have a few PC's laying around, one of which has been running Windows XP SP2 for the last few months. And that system is a P3-450 box from the late 90's.

Here's the hardware:

Pentium-3, 450Mhz
384MB RAM
8MB ATI Rage Pro (AGP)
Symbios-based UW-SCSI adapter
9.1GB UW-SCSI HDD
40GB IDE drive
Sound Blaster 16 with WaveBlaster (ISA!)
2.88MB floppy, 1.44MB floppy, DVD-ROM, CD-RW, and parallel Zip-100 drives

Now back in the day, this was one rather impressive machine. Lots of drives, and a very fast primary hard drive. Today, however, it doesn't really have much going for it. My laptop is three years old, and has a 1.33Ghz processor and 1.25GB of RAM, and an 80GB hard drive.

A bit about the current software installation (as I'm intending to do an "upgrade" installation first): XP was installed for one reason only: to run some Atmel microprocessor development tools for their AT90USB device. As such, the system has the following installed on it (and nothing else):

XP SP2 with all the latest updates
IE7
Microsoft Windows Defender
Windows Media Player 11
Firefox 2.0
Open Office 2.0
Atmel Studio and FLiP
Grisoft AVG Free anti-virus
TortiseSVN

That's it. Most of this software has never been used, and almost every other piece of junk XP installed has been removed (like Outlook). I've never run OpenOffice on the machine, nor have I ever run Windows Media Player. IE7 has only been used for Windows Update. I don't use the system to surf the web -- Firefox is just used to read some HTML-based documentation for the hardware I've been coding against.

As such, this is a pretty pristine Windows XP install. It was installed from a clean drive (previously the system was a Debian box, but Debian and Ubuntu both started to have serious issues with the UW-SCSI drive when I installed the 40GB IDE drive). This XP system is probably going to be a whole lot cleaner than 99% of the XP systems Vista would be installed over.

I'm not expecting Aero to run (of course), but I'm curious to see how it performs otherwise. I don't know if the Atmel tools will work on Vista, and I'm interested to see how other items react. Will the system thrash due to only 384MB of RAM? Will other, non-Aero effects run slowly due to the 450Mhz processor? Will this near pristine XP system upgrade cleanly?

I don't care to run Vista -- I think Microsoft's software design is terrible. I don't like anything they've produced since "Decathalon" for the original IBM PC. But I am curious to find out if things are going to be as bad for old PC owners as some people seem to think. I'm not going to complain if my old system won't support some of the more fancy aspects of Vista -- but will it continue to work as a workstation for my microcontroller programming projects, and some basic web browsing?

Stay tuned. I'm burning the DVD tonight, and will be installing it within the next few days (as time permits).

Yaz.

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