I was given a review copy of Vista Home Premium.. I would
have liked Vista Ultimate, but this is what they sent me - oh well.
I deliberately installed it on weak hardware - an older
386 with 512MB of RAM..
weak, yes, but meeting their listed minimum requirements and
also a system that happily and quickly installed the latest
Ubuntu.

It took just about one hour to get beyond "Expanding Files"
and to do its first reboot. Frankly, I was surprised that
it wasn't longer. After that reboot I dd have an agonizingly
long black screens, but reasonably quickly after that it said "Completing Installation" and within another five minutes or so it rebooted
again and eventually (long periods of blackness again) brought
up a Vista desktop. Painful watching this poor thing boot.

Whoo-hoo. I guess..

Then we had a simple setup - name, password, computer name,
wallpaper and timezone. Following that, Vista said it was checking
my computer's performance - that ate up a few more minutes. More
dark screens, and then a login prompt.. "Preparing your desktop"
took a bit of time.. and then, there it was.. well, almost,
there was still a spinning circle for a bit, but it actually
stopped before I expected it to. I immediately logged off..

I timed logging back in - thirteen seconds - not too bad. My
Mac is speedier, but it isn't running on this slow a processor.
Windows Vista rates this as "1.0" on the Windows Experience scale..
I'm pretty sure that's as low as it can get and still run Vista,
so we won't complain about it being pokey. Yes, Linux
runs better.. I know that.

First disappointment: "Windows did not detect any networking
hardware". Funny, Ubuntu and every other Linux and BSD
OS I ever threw at this old box certainly found the NIC
card. Apparently it's too old for Microsoft to bother
supplying a driver for.. isn't that a kick?

So I guess that I'll have to go buy a more modern
NIC before I can try much else.. we'll revisit this another day.

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