Having just installed the June Beta 2 of Microsoft's Vista desktop OS, on a laptop that also runs Windows 2000 Professional on a separate partition, I wasn't surprised that it ran slower. It's been all over the wires for a fair while now that much better hardware will be needed to make Vista run at a speed which doesn't exasperate users. A quick check with the Windows System Assessment Tool, an app that grades hardware features on your system, like amount of system memory, hard disk size, processor performance and graphics card, gave an overall rating of 1. So, not good, but it wasn't irritatingly slow, just slow.

Funnily enough Microsoft has reached the conclusion that a score of 1 achieved with this tool means that your system is 'woefully underpowered' – here's the quote :

"For example, pointing out that two-thirds of your computers have a System Performance Rating of 1 helps makes it plain to just about anyone that your machines are woefully underpowered."

OK, maybe it should have said 'woefully underpowered when running Vista ', which I might add has a footprint knocking on for just over 7GB, without any applications installed. The Windows 2000 Professional OS I run on the other partition on the same laptop runs fine and has a footprint of just under 5GB, half of which is due to the 30 installed applications.

Imagine all those apps installed on Vista, we're looking at a footprint close to 10GB. When I told my colleague Dan Robinson about this, he pointed out that you wouldn't be able to back it up to a standard DVD. Dan has been busy testing a Blu-Ray drive lately and commented mischievously that this was perhaps the killer app for these new high-capacity systems, ie. backing up Vista OS images.

18 Jul 2006