Is Windows Vista still usable in 2019?
This weekend for a trip, I was planning to do audio mixing. I picked up a laptop from a thrift store for $13. It was a Dell E4310, which in theory would be a great laptop for light audio work, and light gaming. The previous owner had decided to install Windows Vista Home Premium on it. Luckily it had 4 GB RAM, instead of 1 or 2, and was an I5 model.

Quick background on Windows Vista. It released in 2006, and was known for being extremely slow and intensive on resources especially for laptops at the time which had anywhere from 512MB of RAM to 2 GB as a “high end” *laughs in 16 gb*. Three years later it was replaced by Windows 7 as the new and improved Windows, and in 2017 removed from official Microsoft support.

The Dell E4310 is a business laptop, at core. It’s a 13 inch cut down version of the Dell E6410 from my understanding. These are very versatile laptops, where you can remove just about everything, very simply. But this is about Vista, not the laptop itself. My first experience was loading up Opera, and going to Facebook. Facebook actually worked like a charm, if a bit slow because of the mechanical hard drive. My next was my home school site, Connexus. It worked pretty well too, if a bit slow.

I thought for my next venture, I should try to download more than a browser.

First attempt was Discord.

Straight up just didn’t work.

I bought this laptop for portable audio mixing, so next was Audacity.

This was tricky, I knew the most recent version wouldn’t work, so I tried 2.3, which promptly after installation didn’t work. I tried about 4 different versions before giving up.

After that, I was done with Vista, it was no longer of interest. I tried to download a Windows 10 ISO straight from Microsoft, plugged in a 32 GB USB flash drive, and what do you know, it wouldn’t work. I have a theory that Vista doesn’t support over 4 GB USB flash drives, since this was the 32 bit version, for some reason. I tried 2 different 32 GB flash drives, and I’ll just stick with my theory.

My basic question to you : What do you do? That’s all that matter when you choose out any OS. Some people can get away with MS-DOS on something like a Brother Desktop Publisher, and others might need a fully specced out I9 15 inch Macbook Pro.

Despite that, I’d go way way out of my way to use Windows 7 or 10 even if the PC just wouldn’t do it, Vista just doesn’t cut it for anyone anymore. It makes any computer feel a decade older than it is.
['Lil Ramen']
['Vista', 'Windows 10', 'Mac', 'Os', 'Technology']