I have a Dell Dimension 8300 with a P4 2.6ghz cpu and 2 gig of pc2700 ram, 5 hard drives and a 128mb Invidia FX 5900 graphics card. I installed Vista Home Premium j on it just to get a feel for it. It actually performs better than with XP on it. I can multitask better with it and it does well even with only a 128mb video card. Now, I bought my wife a Compaq pc with an AMD 64 X2 5000 chip and 2 gig of PC6400 ram with the Nvidia 6150 onboard video. It has a sata hard drive and DVD Burner. Now, in basic office applications and on the 'Net, it doesn't perform that much faster than my P4 system. But it does excel at multitasking and it's Windows Experience rating is 3.9 versus 3.6 on my the P4 system. I am curious as to why there is not much difference in performance between the 2 systems and...is the Windows Experience rating worth it's weight in...? Also I have yet to experience any hardware or software problems as of yet with Vista on both machines except for sharing drives and files. All replies and opinions are appreciated and respected. Loretta

Vista might be turning off various features on the P4 to help speed it up. Loretta... Now, I bought my wife ----??? "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

I know exactly what you're saying. 2 friends of mine have 2 computers. The first one has an AMD Turion x2 HP Touchsmart with 2GB of RAM. The other friend and his wife just bought a new HP laptop with an AMD Turion x2 processor that has 3GB of RAM. Both of them are terribly slow. The second friend needed me to show him how to connect wirelessly to the internet with Vista. When he was booting it up for me, it took over 3 minutes to boot! And it was brand new! WinSimple Software

Those two machines are so NOT equivalent. The X2 (dual-core) AMD machine will run mad circles around that Socket478 P4 system in any task that really matters any day, any time. The reason why you didn't notice a marked performance difference when using the two machines for basic internet & light office work is because those type of mediocre tasks will not put any performance drag on the most mediocre machine out there today. In fact, you can get those same tasks accomplished on a smartphone these days. Ask anyone around here & they'll let you know your 100MHz (400FSB) P4 is a relic by today's standard. As far as the WEI (Windows Experience Index) base score, it is unfortunately NOT based on the average of your component subscore. Rather, it is determined by the lowest subscore. In other words, your machine is only rated as good as its weakest component. So, don't read too much into the base score. For example, this machine's base score is 4.2 Intel C2D E4300 @ 1.80GHz = 4.8 Memory (RAM) 1.50 GB = 4.5 Radeon X1950 = 7.6 Gaming graphics memory 766 MB = 6.0 Primary HDD 4GB Free (19GB Total) = 4.2 The score is not so much a reflection of the machine, because the 4.2 base score is due to the 20GB partition that I've allocated to testing Windows 7. Jabbering Idiots: Everywhere You Look!

Oops, sorry. Don't want to give the wrong (for me) impression. I got this email from my uncle's neighbor and he wanted some answers. I just skimmed over the email quickly and just added my standard line at the end. Guess I should check stuff like this more carefully in the future...sheesh! Anyway, it's got me curious also as a friend or ours has a Dimension 8400 with a 3.0hgz chip and 2 gigs of ram and pci express video. Does Vista automatically disable some features during installation depending on the hardware that it detects? Thanks for the replies. Loretta

Okay, thanks for the reply. Yes, it makes a lot of sense that the more you push the newer 'stuff' (X2, Core 2 Duo, Core 2 Quads) the better they will perform versus yesterday's 'stuff'. Guess I should try to make some time for 'Vista' in the future if I want to be able to answer questions like this. You guys never fail to answer nobly and completely when needed. You boys are still the cats! Loretta

"Does Vista automatically disable some features during installation depending on the hardware that it detects?" Not that I know of. By the way, which one starts Windows faster? WinSimple Software