Seems that PC hardware (Intel v AMD, Nvidia v ATI...) advances faster than
software (MS for OS, Office... and soon most anything else that runs on a
PC
); i.e. the software cannot take full advantage of multiple core,
HyperThreading, 64bit, 2+GB RAM etc.
For daily tasks - occasional word processing, email, web browsing,
shopping - most any PC produced in the last 2-3 years would be reasonably
fast if you tweak some of the eye-candy in XP or Vista.
If you advance to multimedia tasks - storage of pics, music, movies, you
simply need bigger and faster hard-drives.
Once you step up and begin playing latest games, editing video etc, you need
to upgrade at least the monitor and the graphics card - which implies a
newer motherboard and most anything else - PSU, CPU, RAM.
In a nutshell, if you keep doing whatever you are doing now and your CPU
does not run 100% all the time, you'll be about the same for the Vista
generation.
Michael
"wgd" <wgd@somewhere.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.1f1f70f177d28b06989692@msnews.microsoft.com...
> In article <9543AD0A-F90C-4977-9E06-97A93B9B329D@microsoft.com>,
> woogles@charter.net says...
> of OS replacements and if my computer does not crash and burn between now
> and then.
>>
>> What are your thoughts about the life of a PC in the coming age of
>> Windows Vista?
>>
> Well, I think you've answered your own question. All that really matters
> is if you are satisfied with the performance of Vista on your computer.
> Now that the Vista Beta 2 has been made widely available we see that the
> dire predictions of the hardware requirements for Vista were nonsense. The
> amount of memory is very important. I would not want to run Vista B2 on a
> machine with less than 1 GB memory. And the Aero Glass UI requires a DX9
> video card with at least 64 MB of memory and Shader Model 2.0 support. Not
> a big deal at all. There are many older machines that with some modest
> upgrades will have no problem at all running Vista.