Building a Vista Ready PC

[wingman411]

I am going to build my next pc, but want to be ready to take advantage of all the features of the best version of windows vista. I don't have any preferences as to amd or intel, nvidia or ati. Should I start buying components now, or wait for vista to come closer to coming out.

I don't want to get a gateway, dell, or hp prebuilt unless someone convinces me it is the best way to go.

Budget is $2500 or so USD. Only keeping current my current mouse, Plextor CD/DVD burner.

 

[LeeJend]

There is nothing special about being "Vista ready". The only issues right now are whether there are up to date VISTA drivers for the particular hardware you buy. That should not be an issue by the time Vista comes out.

As for buying a Dell (I won't get into my opinion of gateway or HP) it is not such a bad move. Especially if you wait for Vista to come out and get it included in the bundle for a minimal cost increase. The monitor, printer and basic windows are pretty much thrown in for free price wise.

The real value of going with a Dell prebuilt for Vista though will be that Dell has fully tested and integrated the hardware and drivers. Minimal risk to you with a new Windows version. Just watch what you pay for the "added extras" when upgrading the Dell. Some of the extra's get pretty pricey compared to street prices.

As for buying anything now, I would (and am) waiting. Both AMD and Intel have new product lines coming out soon that will be incompatible with much of what is on the street now (MB, RAM, CPU, CPU HSF). When the new product comes out it will be upward compatible or if you want to stay with current generation hardware you can expect it to be cheaper when the next gen CPU/RAM comes out.

 

[Son Goku]

You are best to wait. Vista will include Direct X 10. However and at present, there are no Direct X 10 gfx cards on the market. There might be some news this summer or latter this year (we shall see), but until Direct X 10 is close to being available, neither ATI nor nVidia are necessarily thinking they need to get a DX10 part out. The GeForce 7900 is not a DX 10 part, and it is not being marketed as such...

Besides there being no card which is specifically designed around any features that DX 10 will bring to the table, Vista is still in beta. Whether or not it's a feature complete beta (aka Microsoft has locked down the feature set, and announced only bug fixes remain), I'm not sure, though perhaps someone is. But until the feature set is locked down, new features can still be added to the OS... New features can tend to slow things down, whereas code optomization (not necessarily a first priority when they're still adding stuff and trying to "get it to work"), can help one gain some performance... Personally, I wouldn't take too much as certainty, until the system RTMs (gets 'released to manufacturer'). That RTM build, is pretty much what we'll be seeing at time of retail...

Microsoft has still not mentioned requirements/recommendations for the thing. Any reasonably fast computer today, will probably be OK. Beyond that, we all have to wait for more on Vista itself, as well as some of the parts (Direct X 10 graphics cards), to be put to market...

 

[j79zlr]

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/evaluate/hardware/entpguid.mspx

 

[Son Goku]

Keep in mind also however, that some of Microsoft's OS recommendations have tended to be a bit on the conservative side. Such as when the recomendations for win 95 were

* 486 DX
* 8 MB RAM
* ...

Ugh, even with a Pentium 75 and 8 MB of RAM, win95 ran like crap, and was one of the absolute worst experiences I've had wrt a computer in my life

It wasn't even running programs on top, as Explorer.exe would routinely crash, till I had more RAM in the system, with no programs running at all. It would be like "A program has performed an illegal operation:" Get details, and

Explorer.exe has caused an invalid page fault in krnl32.dll, at...

Most people outside of Redmond were saying you want at least 16 MB for win95... In fact, bye, and bye, doubling their RAM recomendations on the OS might not be a bad idea:

with
• A modern processor
• 512MB of system memory or more, and
• A graphics processor that will support Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM)

I say this in part, because from experience, 512 MB RAM on winXP Pro alone, (forget Vista) had started resulting in too much swapping and had become somewhat painful (though no where's near the 8 MB on win95). It was fine a couple years ago, but now 1 GB really is better. Don't expect Vista to run any better, then what many of us are seeing on winXP Pro today (with the same amount of RAM)...

Now does that mean everyone needs 1 GB on winXP Pro today? No, and for most years I had it, 512 MB, and before then 384 MB wasn't bad... But many of us have found that 512 MB just doesn't cut it anymore, as it used too...

Still, that's looking more at a computer that can run Vista reasonably well, which the comps many of us have currently will likely do. That isnt' talking something that will exploit, and make use of new features it has been designed to support; some of which like DX 10 (and the equivallent hardware to make use of all it's new features), hasn't been marketed yet...