* I came, I saw, I yawned
HP sent me one of the new Microsoft Vista enabled PCs to play with for a few days. Since I specifically warned you that upgrading to Vista makes no sense on existing PCs, getting Vista on a new PC is the only way to go. Well, you can avoid Vista entirely, but that’s another story. If you want Vista, you need a new PC to run it.
I requested a PC that runs the “full Vista experience” including the Aero Glass interface. The added graphical horsepower needed to run Aero is the primary reason updating your existing machines with Vista makes no sense, because very few older PCs have the needed graphics support. Until the new product releases, HP’s popular corporate desktops didn’t, either, but the dc5750 I received runs Aero acceptably well.
Let’s talk about the HP desktop first. The HP Compaq dc5750 Small Form Factor PC can sit flat on the desk (like under a monitor) or on its side like a mini-tower. Speaking of monitors, the dc5750 includes two monitor ports: one VGA and one Digital Video Interface (DVI) for LCD panel monitors. This feature makes it easy to run two monitors at once, which Vista supports with less hassle than XP. The dc5750 is more power efficient (new power supply technology) and makes less noise than previous models.
My test unit included the AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core processor running at 2GHz, but other HP models in the dc5700 series offer Intel Pentium and Core 2 Duo processors. An ATI (bought by AMD last year) video chipset used part of the 1GB of RAM, leaving me 894MB. Interestingly, HP’s own configuration screens allow you to install up to 4GB of RAM when you’re running XP or FreeDOS, but only 2GB of RAM for Vista.
HP still includes PS/2 connections on the PC and on its default keyboard and mouse, but my mouse was the optional ($3 upgrade) optical USB mouse with scroll. Since most keyboards are PS/2, this configuration means you can keep a favorite keyboard rather than changing to a USB keyboard as some vendors force you to do. The only flaw in the dc5750 was broken stereo hardware, since only the right channel played through the speaker connections in front and back. Review systems sometimes bounce around from office to office, but a purchased system with this flaw will be replaced immediately.
Although the PC rated a 3.0 on the Windows Experience Index, there was no snap like you expect on a new computer. This brings us to the Microsoft Vista Business (32-bit version rather than 64-bit) operating system. The performance caused yawns. The changes in the operating system caused yawns. The gap between Vista hype and Vista reality caused me to shake my head in despair.
Good news first: open source favorites OpenOffice 2.0, Mozilla Firefox browser and the Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client installed and ran fine on Vista. My Iomega REV 35GB removable hard disk drive worked after downloading new Vista drivers from Iomega. HP doesn’t load bloatware on the hard drive on its business PCs so I didn’t have to uninstall any software.
Bad news second: we waited five years for this? Vista looks like a new Desktop Theme in XP. The Aero interface may be pretty, but it does nothing to increase business functionality. In fact, seeing background graphics through the edges of the foreground window just blurs the edges of the foreground and background, making it harder to find and focus on the foreground window. Functions and icons moved around from where they were in XP without any discernible advantage. Gadgets — such as clocks and weather reports that you can put in a column on the side of your screen — take up screen space, and I couldn’t find an Auto-Hide option like the Taskbar has.
I tried running Windows Movie Maker on the Vista box and the performance was unusable because of regular dropouts. Yet Movavi VideoSuite 4.0 running on an older HP d510 with a 1.8GHz Pentium 4 and 256MB of RAM ran the same video from the same network-attached storage unit with no skips, burps or dropouts. That’s not good for Vista.
I’d heard before that Microsoft purposefully took a feature out of its WordPad application in Vista, and it’s true. You can no longer open DOC files with WordPad. With XP, you can open and edit DOC files in WordPad as a security measure, because macro viruses that run in Word don’t run in WordPad. Sorry, that’s gone. And Vista changes Solitaire as well, which really surprised me. It’s prettier, perhaps, but cards flip themselves and you have to turn off the sound to avoid getting caught playing at work. Hmm, maybe that’s one of the productivity improvements Microsoft promised: harder to play Solitaire.
The Business edition of Vista didn’t automatically display games; I had to enable them. I can understand that. But why are Photo Gallery and Media Player enabled? Are they business applications in the Microsoft universe?
HP will make a batch of new product and service announcements for its small and medium business customers at the end of March, so Vista support will continue to improve. But my advice for Vista remains the same: avoid it while you can. Wait for the first Service Pack and turn off the Aero interface to reclaim some of your computer’s performance.
