Over at ZDNet, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes has put together a really great, in-depth look at the Windows Experience Index, which is the score that the Windows Vista System Assessment Tool produces. Excellent work.
Adrian’s post is a good companion to the first post in my new ZDNet series, Vista Mythbusters #1: It’s not a hardware hog. Be sure to read the comments in the Talkback section, too. A lot of people look at a computer I spent $825 on two and a half years ago and consider it some sort of super-system. Amazing what folks will settle for in the name of trying to save a tiny amount of money.
Ed Bott 
Have you or do you know anyone that has gotten this tool to work on a Windows MCE machine? For some reason I haven’t been able to get this to work on mine.
Thank you.
Thanks for the kind words Ed!
I enjoyed your “Hardware Hog” post too, but boy did the comments turn sour quick. If they think your system is a super PC, what the heck do they make of mine? 🙂
Ed, a bit off topic but, have you seen a comparison of the different levels of security one can expect by choosing Public rather than Private when connecting to a network? Is really safer or just meant to feel safer? I’d really like to see how the network environment is different by choosing one over the other.
Nice article, but the haters seemed to miss the point entirely.
What I took away from it was that if a 2 year old, $825 box can run it fine, then any new machine you purchase now will run it with no issues whatsoever.
Upgrades are mostly a waste of time anyway, especially in the enterprise.
I’ve got a crap old test box that is running beta 2 and while it is obviously a beta, with some niggling UI issues. it actually performs just as well, if not better, than when I ran XP on it.
I was surprised by those posts, too. I have an uncle to who idiotically buys used computers for more than a good, new one would cost, thinking he’s saving money with a system that has only 256M of memory! But there are a lot of people living on meager or very low incomes and have very little left over for new hardware or software. I can empathize with that. In other threads, you might have noticed how much some talked of waiting for a pirated copy of Vista instead of paying the latest Amazon-listed price/s.
It’s a weird thing that so many people don’t want to pay any amount for any software. Since they cannot pirate hardware, I’m sure that’s a sore spot.
I’m pretty happy with Vista Pre-RC1’s performance on my current box. It’s running the Aero Glass interface just fine. Specs: Pentium 4 2.8GHz on 533MHz FSB, 512MB RAM, Radeon 9550 Pro graphics card with 128MB RAM (AGP 8x), 160GB UDMA-133 HDD. The motherboard is old enough that the AGP slot actually only runs at 4x, and the IDE channels at 100MHz.
To run Aero Glass, I had to upgrade the graphics from an original NVidia GeForce 4 Ti4800SE with 64MB. That card isn’t fully DX9-compliant so can’t ever run Glass. The only other upgrade was the HDD and that’s only because I’ve used so much of the 120GB HDD that XP is installed on and am pretty wary of partition-management programs. Actually, the ones I tried can’t handle Windows’ Dynamic Disks – I can’t recall why I upgraded this disk to dynamic, but certainly Acronis Disk Director can’t handle it, which they don’t tell you before you buy it!
Chris Sells is running Windows Vista pre-RC1 on a box which he paid $366 for. http://www.sellsbrothers.com/news/showTopic.aspx?ixTopic=2040.
(Disclaimer: Chris works on the Indigo [Windows Communication Foundation] team at Microsoft.)
He would have to buy – if he didn’t work for Microsoft – a Full Packaged Product or OEM licence for Windows Vista when it’s released, since the machine didn’t come with an OEM Windows licence.
Mime Dimmick, is your video card made by Sapphire? I’m going to buy one and want to be sure it works well with AGP 4x…