Vista Squad

As Per my Blog,

http://vistasquad.co.uk/blogs/scottbelton/archive/2008/07/26/project-vistasquad.aspx

This is my insane idea to create the ultimate (no pun intended) rig to run Windows Vista on, on a small budget whilst being environmental sound by reusing old pc parts, to prove a point that you can get the best from this operating system without employing the lastest Dual or Quad core pc’s.

For Starters I need a list of parts (wish list). Yeah I wish! (Dear Santa?)

PC case, power supply, hard drive, mobo, cpu, ram, graphics card etc. All this, plus more on the smallest of small budgets! Under £100.

Lucky for me being an IT Pro I do come across old and disused or broken pc’s but nothing that you can’t picked up by yourselves with a little persistence or the use of ebay (if you must) I did!

Don’t be shy wait for friends or family to upgrade and then pounce on their old hardware.

Great one phone call later, sister’s pc broken, shame! And she brought a new one; well that’s the case, power supply sorted (all that was worth saving anyway).

Check out the photos.

http://vistasquad.co.uk/photos/project_vistasquad/default.aspx

I will continue to keep you informed of how this project goes so stay tuned.

I honestly think that the reason so many people hate Windows Vista comes down to the IT reviewers.

I have a hell of a load of computers here, the ones I use on a daily basis at the moment are 2 core quad desktops and a dual core laptop, one of the desktops run Ubuntu and the others run Windows Vista Ultimate.

 At the time of the Vista launch, I had a few Pentium D machines.

The machines I use for testing are completly seporate to my work machines, and I always use the previous generation ones, so, when I did my initial tests of Vista, I was using P4 machines that were above minimum specification, but not that good. There was many driver issues (not really Microsoft's fault, however, the end user generally does not understand this).

People want to either buy a complete unit or get a disk and just make something work.

At Vistas launch, so many OEM's were selling computers that were the minimum specification, fine they worked, but you couldnt really do anything fancy (Without them over heating or going VERY slow), and I think this is partly Microsoft's fault with the Vista ready/compatible branding.

Nearly all technical writers simply blasted any computer with Vista on it, without giving it a chance. I am personally not a fan of Dell, however one of their nicer machines, fully loaded and powerful was given a harsh review simply for the fact it had Vista on it. Many people pick up on this sort of thing without giving it a chance themselves.

The general problem I get now is mainly with people saying should I use XP or Vista, and it is a hard one to answer. At the end of the day, XP loads faster than Vista, but then again, 98 loads faster than xp and 3.1 loads faster than that... but you really do not want to go back to those days!

There are many nice features, however Vista still lacks a killer feature that makes everything else obsolete. What I personally do now is I always recommend people use Vista on new machines, however I never usually recommend upgrading a fully working XP machine unless it is beefy hardware.

You see many people say "Vista DRM", personally, I am sure there are components in Vista, however as long as they do not bother me, I do not really care. The moment I download something and it says "Windows has prevented you from playing this file" or something like that, that will be the day I switch to Linux only.

I had one client come to me and ask for a machine with XP, I asked him why he does not want Vista, he told me that his neighbour has it and hates it. I said trust me, it works fine, I put it on and he loved it, I visited the neighbour, and no joke, they were running Vista on a P3, 30GB hard drive, 768MB ram.... never even tried installing it on anything like that!

I still stand by the fact that I think not everything should be running Vista, XP is a very mature product and there are many benefits to it, however on new computers, there is no reason not to use it.

Scott, good luck with the project! I did something similar a while ago.

I build a entire machines - without case.

Celeron (forget number)

160GB hard drive

2GB memory

DVD Rom

motherboard with aero compatible graphics

I bought all at trade prices and it ended up costing me around £75 + vat (without the actual copy of Windows!), I would never normally use a celeron, but I wanted to demonstrate a point, the new ones are 64 bit and dual core... so pretty much more powerful than most 3+ year old mainstream cpus.

It ran Vista wonderfully and fast, and it prooved the point I was trying to make to the people I had it there for.

Good luck with the project! hope I have not gone on to much and I hope someone finds this intresting!

Hi William

Glad to see I'm not the only one either mad for building silly machines or for always getting involved in either defending Vista our agreeing that XP is now after many patches a great o/s.

I total agree with many of your points, it’s a shame people can’t remember back to when XP was first released, running that on the minimum spec, did not load well or fast if I recall.

Your very right unfortunately all the reviews out there seem to just blast everything new, what always grabs me as funny in that to a non trade person (user) the I.T world always boosts at looking to the future but why are so many reviewers having the age old problem of being scared of change. Sure you and I have heard all these objections before, me personally I think people should run what they like, enjoy and learn from it.

I.T to me is a job and a passion building this pc on a budget (really cheap), is the passion side and as an experience (you won’ believe the price I’ve just paid for water cooling) also I’m a firm believer that computers never seem to get their full run at life and I’m sure we all agree that the I.T scrap heaps are growing at a needles pace.

Also a whole generation of youngsters growing up now only know of one O/S that being XP, it’s a shame. This is also part of my Idea that if money is tight and they can’t keep up with the Jones’s they can still have fun with any kit they like. ( I still run a very serviceably Sony Vaio laptop 700Mhz and only 192MB Ram slow on XP but great on 98)

I say enjoy the I.T experience, have fun and learn,  I will try and never get to involved in what O/S is better, for me at present Vista is great but as you say lacking in that one great killer feature.

Any suggestions? (Promise not to tell and make a fortune of them)

Thanks for the reply it’s good to hear from other people so passionate about computers.

I really do not know where computers are going and not sure what Microsoft / Windows can do next.

Nearly every version of Windows has had a major feature that made you want to upgrade,

3.1 - new, brilliant at the time
3.11 - networking, and you could visit the 3 websites that there were at the time! (I wish that I registered some .coms back then!)
NT 3.51 - Business use only, no benefit for home users
95 - new gui, miracle at the time
NT 4 - mainly business counterpart to 95, not really used at homes.
98 - I never really got this move, I found no benefit over using 95 with the last service release that added active desktop and the other features. 98SE was better, but still had some annoying features. Did anyone ever actually use Active Desktop? everyone I know always turned it off!
2000 - Business version of 98, I think this was the most usable version of windows ever and many people prefered it over 98 & xp for many years
ME - They tried to back port to many features from 2000, I remember that I quite liked the base OS, but it just broke far to many applications, ran slower to the user without any visible benefits.
xp - at launch, well.... it worked. It had the stability of the NT kernel but targeted to home users. After SP1, it has got to be the best version of Windows.*
Vista - from launch has had the harshest reviews - however, on top end hardware worked 100% fine at launch.

Think I got all the non server versions! 

XP was before I was into computers as a job, I had BSOD left right and centre on a machine that worked fine with 98, I cursed Microsoft and thought Windows was rubbish... then I traced the BSOD and realised it was a Iomega driver for a external CDRW drive. I now only buy hardware that I know is compatible with Windows, I do not download random demos that have DRM that install components that tie up resources. I refuse to install any application game that has a properitry DRM technique (apart from 3dsmax, and adobe stuff as I need it :( ), and my computers run 100% stable (apart from that damn

When it gets down to it, you get what you pay for. Many people go in to a shop and ask for the cheapest pc without even looking at the spec. Someone I know was just about to buy a £350 laptop as it was on offer and I showed for £20 more, he could buy a much much better machine (not as good as a brand new top of the line one, but still better than he would of got). Many places still sell Vista machines with 1GB memory, and shared memory graphics, meaning that the OS can get 512MB or less, people then blame Microsoft

There really needs to be end user education, but I do not see that happening any time soon.

sorry, gone on loads here.... I hope people find this useful and I am not just talking to Scott, I know we are on a similar wavelength on these issues!

XP is successful because it works and works well. Vista has many nice features - aero makes it nicer to do day to day work, the standby/hibernate on laptops is better... search on the start bar is cool - although I still use dos - dir *work*.doc /s to find what I need instead of the top right search!

None of these features are killer and I simply do not know what Microsoft can do. It would be nice if they just keep improving a single OS, but they are a company, they get money for releasing new products.

I just do not think that there is much further current computers can go, look back 10 years and the limitation was the OS, we now have a very capable OS and the limit of what you can do comes down to software. Microsoft can re design the start bar as many times as they like, I just do not see a major OS change coming any time soon, we are just going to see a lot more optomisation of current components (e.g. networking stack).

I think that very possibly, the future of Windows is going to be a subscription based service - they would release a new version every 6 months-year, you pay around £10 per machine per version and if you choose not to update, you do not get new features but you continue to get security and other updates until the normal support cycle is over.

Sorry, for going around in circles again, i will leave it there!... if I have repeated myself to much and made any mistakes, I am VERY tired!.... I can say so much on this subject, I hope someone finds it useful!