Everyone knows Windows Vista is a resource hog. Everyone says it doesn�t even get out of first gear without a gigabyte of RAM, and it takes 2 GB before it stops stuttering and stammering with each mouse click. Everyone says Vista Home Basic is the black sheep of the family, deserving only of a sideways glance and a dismissive harrumph. That�s what I keep reading on the Internet, so it must be true. Which is why I had steeled myself for pitiful performance when I yanked all but 512MB out of my test system last week and downgraded to Vista Home Basic. With a 2002�vintage CPU and Microsoft�s minimum recommended RAM, running the most basic of Vista retail editions on a 30GB partition, surely this would be a painful experience. Or not. You shouldn�t believe everything you read. I was expecting to need Valium and vodka and an on-call therapist to handle Vista Home Basic on this low-end system. Instead, I found a snappy, responsive OS that did everything I asked of it. My primary goal was to measure startup times, answering skeptics who thought my test results from a few weeks ago were skewed by the expansive 1.5GB of RAM on this ancient P4 test machine. So I pulled out all but one stick of RAM and prepared for the worst. All you Vista bashers will be disappointed to hear what happened next: * The system booted two seconds faster than it had with all that extra RAM. On average, Vista�s boot time was less than 30 seconds. * Menus popped up instantly, with no lag or delay. * My favorite DVD, Blade Runner, played flawlessly at full resolution, in surround sound. (I had to install a DVD decoder first � Vista Home Basic doesn�t include DVD playback capabilities out of the box.) * I was able to rip a CD, check my Google Mail account on Mozilla Thunderbird, and play a full-screen slide show, all at the same time, without a single skip or hiccup. * Even installing Norton Antivirus 2007 couldn�t slow things down. The Norton software added 7 seconds to my startup time, but after it loaded, everything worked exactly as expected. To be fair, I didn�t do anything I knew would have brought this system to its knees. I didn�t try to rip a DVD, decode the human genome, or run Office 2007. But still� I�d have no qualms about handing this system over to my mom, my brother, or my best friend. On the Windows Experience Index, this system rates a 2.0, thanks to its sluggish RAM (and even when I put those two extra 512MB sticks of RAM back in, the number doesn�t budge). The CPU on this system earned a 3.8. By contrast, Intel�s bottom-of-the-line 1.6GHz Core 2 Duo T5200, standard on every $599 notebook PC these days, rates a 4.3. Surprisingly, even the visuals on this system were a treat. With a three-year-old video card, this system was capable of running Vista�s Aero graphics. But because Aero doesn�t run on Home Basic, I was stuck with the Vista Standard display. It lacks the transparent window borders and whizzy live previews on taskbar buttons, but otherwise the look is indistinguishable from a system running Windows Vista Ultimate. The conventional wisdom says Vista Home Basic is a dog, and that it slows to a crawl with 512MB. Don�t believe everything you read. bron: www.topdownloads.net
