Should I upgrade to Vista?

[fritzfield1234]

I bought a Vista Ultimate upgrade on ebay. Looks to be the real thing.

I want to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 1000 notebook. I have already added 1.0G ram; changed the CPU from a Celeron M 2.2 to a Pentium 4 M 2.2; and added a 160GB Seagate HD.

The unit is now quite snappy w/ XP Home. Would I be shooting myself in the foot if I did the upgrade to Vista?

I have Vista on my desktop computer, a 2.8 P4 Northwood with 2.5G RAM and I am quite satisfied. Hence the desire to upgrade the lappy.

Thanks for any advise.

 

[KeypoX]

how much was it?

also you can install and NOT put in your key and try it for 30 days

 

[Cutthroat]

People have had various degrees of luck installing Vista on older hardware, I'd do as KeypoX suggested and not use your key until your satisfied.

 

[fritzfield1234]

The Vista Ultimate Upgrade package cost me $126.00 on ebay.

The new HD was $99 from Newegg.

The used P4M was $12.50 on ebay.

The 1.0G SODIMM was $90 from memoryup.com.

 

[Arkaign]

Hmmm seems overkill for that hardware, IMO. What features of Ultimate can you really put to decent use on that? Vista zings along nicely with a good video card, 2gb or more of ram, and a dual-core Cpu. Any less can present various levels of disappointment. Is there something you want to do that XP is not letting you do? When you say that it is *quite snappy*, that could easily be the opposite after a Vista install.

My advice : if you have your old notebook hdd (the one you replaced with the 160GB), then format it and load a fresh unactivated copy of Vista on your notebook for testing purposes. Try tuning/customizing it to your preferences, and then evaluate whether the performance is adequate for your uses. Be sure and install the latest performance-related patches! They do help Good luck.

 

[Pez D Spencer]

Ive got a Ultimate running on a P4 3.0GHz 530, and 2GB DDR2 533 and it does really good. HOWEVER, when I only had 1GB of RAM it seemed to struggle. Aside from NOD32 antivirus and Spybot's Tea Timer I don't have anything running in the background and the OS still uses around 25% or 512MB on average. Plus I've disabled as many unneeded services as possible. My advice to people is don't touch Vista with less than 2GB but that's just my opinion.

XP was the same way. It called for 128MB RAM minimum but 256MB was more realistic. In turn Vista calls for 1GB but 2GB is more like it.

My 2 pennies.

 

[imported_djnes]

Originally posted by: KeypoX
how much was it?

also you can install and NOT put in your key and try it for 30 days

That's your best advice. Make a ghost image or so of your current install, so you can reload, if needed. Give it the 30 days trial, and see how it runs.