Preview of Vista On Old Hardware

Grooves writes "According to tests performed by Ars Technica, Windows Vista will need some coddling on old hardware. As a follow-up to their performance review of Vista Beta 2, Ars tested the latest public builds of Vista on hardware spanning from 2001 to a Thinkpad purchased a few months ago. The results show that Vista is extremely RAM hungry, graphical power is less of an issue unless you want eye candy, and hard drive I/O is critical. Also, their experience with 'in-place upgrades' was abysmal, and mirrored my own experiences."

Comments

Speaking of spin

[Control Group]

From TFA:

At this point with a clean install, we can recommend any of the tested systems for basic usage
[snip]
For a great experience, we would pack all of the systems with at least 1GB of RAM. We make the same recommendation for XP today. (bold added)

And this turns into "Vista is extremely RAM hungry" in the blurb? Nice.

(One of the systems tested had 512 MB RAM)