1.66GHz does strike me as a little slow for Vista, and I would also wonder how quickly that hard drive responds. Also the FSB, at 664MHz, is just a tad slow.
But otherwise it seems like you should be good to go.
Did the laptop come with a bunch of Malware pre-installed on it?
Hard Disk (C:) : 103.45GB (41.03GB, 40% Free Space) (NTFS) @ ST9120821AS 120GB (SATA150, 8MB Cache)Yeah, but the hard drive is a 5400RPM unit. That's standard issue speed for notebooks (you pay more to get 7200RPM), but it's not speedy enough to keep Vista being more of a pig than it already is. Unfortunately 10KRPM is unavailable in any notebook I've ever seen.
Make sure the Vista indexing features are turned off. Otherwise every disk operation is slower. Yeah, that's one of the features that differentiates Vista from XP (sort of), but it wasn't done right and so it's a pain to live with. Better to turn it off, IMO.
It came with the obligatory HP “Vista media pro” or something stupid like that.
I scraped it clean and installed a retail copy of Vista Ultimate, thinking that it would somehow help.
There was ALL kinds of garbage on this thing.
A feature that allowed me to listen to MP3s with the laptop *off*, for instance.
[like I don’t already have 3 iPods, numerous CD stereo systems, etc and *need* such a stupid “feature”]
It’s not the *system* that’s a dog....it runs like wildfire when freshly formatted.
As soon as you have to jump through hoops to install external drives, programs, etc, is when it simply craps out.
[I have turned off the “installation security” features and it made not one whit of difference.]
Vista just inexplicably “loses” things.
I’ve had my Photoshop CS3 just “go missing” from one day to the next.
Just ~gone~...’missing DLLs’ are the rule, not the exception and of all stupid things, 2Gs of RAM are “not enough” to backup my email and saved data when I get fed up enough to start the reformatting process over again.
[about every 3 months, here, lately]
No matter.
One way or another, I’ll force XP down this thing’s throat as soon as I have a day to devote to it...or kill it, trying.
It would be over and done with by now if I didn’t have 2 more art pieces to make for my dog breed club’s benefit auction.
There’s a deadline on those and I just don’t have a day to ‘waste” messing with this, right now.
But otherwise it seems like you should be good to go.
...go...back to Windows XP. Kidd, stop blaming hardware for the problems that Vista has. What, do you work for MS or something? Don't get me wrong, I make a very good living thanks to MS, but I recognize a rotten egg when I smell it.
I think the problem may be salamander's Windows Experience Index. Most power users have one much higher. Mine, for instance, is 742 ;^)