Just thought some of you may be interested in how Vista performs on an older computer. I was skeptical of all of the complaints about Vista not being able to run on old hardware. I took my old Poweredge SC400 and upgraded to Vista Enterprise. Here are the Specs of my PE SC400:

 

2.4 Ghz P4 (Pre-HT, no EMT64)

640 MB ram

Radeon 9250 256 MB PCI GPU

2 40GB x 5400 RPM IDE HDs (no raid)

CD Rom Drive (no-DVD drive)

 

About three weeks ago I noticed Technet had Vista on CD so I figured I'd give it a shot. I was running XP on the box previously and everything was running fine. Fairly quick too for a non-gaming machine. I chose to install the Vista 32 bit Enterprise build which I think is pretty much equivalent to Vista Business. The install went fine and Vista recognized all of my hardware including the onboard audio and my second HD showed up without me having to add it through disk manager. The installation media is unpatched RTM so it was a bit buggy and slow at first. 

 

I defragged the HDs and applied all patches through autoupdate. I haven't done SP1 yet. For antivirus I installed Forefront security and enabled Windows Defender. I left UAC enabled. The install did not recognize the computer as being good enough to run Aero. I would have been surprised if it had. 

 

After a few tweaks and letting the PC run for a few days to index, it seems to be running fine. In terms of speed, XP booted about 10 seconds faster but once in the OS I couldn't tell much difference. Both use the same amount of memory on this system.

 

Here's my conclusion from the experience.  The first thing to note is that it does work and performance is near that of XP. If your organization has a site license and wants everyone on the same OS it may be worth looking into. For a home users who have to buy a license its most likely not worth it. 

Obviously if you want the best performance possible with all of the features of Vista you would install it on a new fully compatible computer.