I finally upgraded my home computer, after 8 years. According to Moore’s Law my home PC was something like 64 dog-PC years old. I don’t want to go into the whole, “I remember when 8MB of RAM was enough” story but this thing was a screamer when I first got it. It was a Dell Dimension V350 making it a Pentium II, 350MHz, and I loaded it up with 256MB of RAM and a humungous 8MB AGP video card. Add a 17″ CRT monitor and I was the coolest computing kid on the block, in the year 1999. I think the hard drive was 8GB, which I couldn’t even imagine filling (even though I was downloading mp3s as fast as my dial-up connection would allow with the original Napster).

Well my new laptop, which I ordered from Sears of all places, is a Toshiba Satellite P100 MA305C. It’s got some kind of Centrino Duo processor and 2GB of RAM and an adequate video card and hard drive. There’s a good reason why I don’t know exactly what my computer is running: just about anything new these days is more than fast enough. I lost track of the advances in processor, video card and RAM speeds when they were no longer being scooped up by businesses in order to do business faster. With the exception of the newest FPS games and 3d design/CAD software, today’s computers have no trouble keeping up - with one proviso. DO NOT KEEP WINDOWS VISTA ON YOUR NEW COMPUTER!

I read a couple of reviews saying that Vista was a little power hungry but that it was beautiful. My new laptop came pre-loaded with Vista Home Premium so I was confident that my new, super-fast laptop was going to be able to handle it. Then, the day before my laptop arrived, I read another review saying that you needed at least 4GB of RAM to run Vista near the equivalent of XP Pro with 2GB of RAM. I really couldn’t believe it but I did a little more research. To add another 2GB of RAM to a notebook would cost me about the price of another whole laptop! Well, I still thought they were over-reacting. Unfortunately I was wrong.

2GB really isn’t enough to run Windows Vista Home Premium. I know, I tried. What was truly amazing was to wipe the hard drive, put XP Pro on and watch the machine fly. It was like two different computers.

While I was trying out Vista I purchased Norton 360. My goal was to be sure that this home PC would never see a virus or spyware and be backed up on a weekly basis. 360 promises to do all of those things in one neat package. The first install went great and everything was pumping along just famously, until the first LiveUpdate. After that, everything went to hell. Nothing would update, uninstalling and reinstalling didn’t fix it, Norton chat support couldn’t help me, I was stuck. Thankfully the motherboard went on my brand new laptop (there’s a funny sentence). When I got it back I put XP Pro straight on and gave Norton another chance. Same problems. Nothing would update properly. This time, though, the steps given to me by the chat support DID fix the problem and I’ve been running problem-free since then - and I actually like it. Unfortunately, I think most people would have given up long before I did. I wasn’t about to let nearly $100 go down the drain.

Bottom line? Vista is definitely NOT worth the upgrade. Norton 360 is actually pretty useful, if you can get past all of the initial bugs.