About a year ago, my trusty desktop PC, Lenny, started having issues. It was really just a one issue, anytime I tried to start him up he would reboot before loading Windows XP.  It didn’t bother me too much at first since I wasn’t home very often and had my work laptop. Eventually I got sick of having to use my Uncle’s computer to print boarding passes and decided it was time to fix Lenny.

Running an XP repair did nothing, so I installed a second copy of XP alongside the original to let me back up my files. When I was done backing up, I was just planning on doing a clean install of XP. Before I did though, I remembered that I had a copy of Vista from my RIT MSDN account, that I had never gotten around to installing. I’d used it once or twice while fixing other people’s computers but had never actually used it for more than an hour or so. The biggest reason for that was Lenny.

Lenny is about 7 years old now, and not exactly top of the line anymore. At the time I got Vista he was sporting an Athlon XP 2400+, 512 Megs PC2700 RAM and an nVidia Geforce ti4600. XP ran well enough and I knew Vista would run like crap. At some point the ti4600 died and was replaced with a Geforce 6600GT. About six months ago, I was dropping off some stuff at Goodwill and happened to arrive just as someone was dropping off a PC. I checked it out and discovered it was a Pentium 4 2.4GHZ with 512 DDR RAM. Being the scavenger I am, I promptly stole it. When I got it back home I discovered the only things worth keeping were the processor and the RAM. Anyway, the moral of this story is Lenny got an upgrade to a gig of ram and it is kind of sad to see people throwing away computers nearly as good as the one you have.

OK, back to Vista. Freshly upgraded with a new video card and the extra 512 RAM, I decided Vista was with a shot. It was surprisingly painless and I only ran into one major issue. nVidia in their infinite wisdom, decided they weren’t going to release drivers for nForce2 motherboards but Vista figured something out and made it work anyway. Everything else went smoothly. The performance wasn’t blazing but it was good enough for about 90% of the stuff I do on a computer.

After fiddling around with it for a few days, I ended up reformatting again and putting XP back on. At the time I was heavily into TF2 and found it didn’t run very good, partially due to the unsupported motherboard.

Overall, I liked Vista. It’s not amazing but if I had a better PC with up to date hardware, I’d still be running it now. It wasn’t nearly as bad as it’s been made out to be by the media and public in general. It’s my opinion that Vista got a bad reputation for many little reasons mostly out of Microsoft’s control. Mainly because of driver and software incompatibilities. Of course, since I didn’t get around to installing it until it was nearly two years old I missed out on many of the problems that likely influenced people’s decisions.

I’m looking forward to checking out the Windows 7 once I get the chance to install it.