quote:
Originally posted by alegator
It's a Dell Dimension 8200, came originally with WinXP SP0, 2Gb RDRAM, P4 3.06Ghz HT, Intel 850 chipset, ATI Radeon 800XT AGP, Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card, WD500Gb IDE, LG GSA H42N DVD burner, Lucent PCI WinModem, Intel Pro /100M PCI NIC.
That's a little better than I'd have expected from 2001.
Windows 7 is said to perform about the same or even slightly better than XP on marginal hardware. That would be a massive improvement over Vista. It is also much nicer than Vista.
I'd probably not bother to upgrade looking for performance, but you can certainly do so if you are tired of XP and want to try something new. The user interface improvements are worthwhile, I think.
It really depends on how hard this will be for you to do. I don't think an in-place upgrade is even an option and wouldn't recommend it if it is -- you will be looking at wiping your system volume partition clean. You will have to back up data, find new drivers and do other things which are not necessarily difficult for technically inclined users, but could be a daunting task if you have never done anything like it.
Assuming you are going to go with
the legally available RC release, this is also something you will have to do again before the March of next year, when it expires. Microsoft says the RC (and various betas) will
not be in-place upgradable to the release (although there are reports that it works). This may not be a problem if you plan to get a new computer before then.
