I currently run Vista x64 on my gateway laptop 7510gx with 2 gig ram and
dedicated 4 gig lexar lightning 2 for readyboost feature. Of course, with no
onboard sound available for vista x64, I had to plug in my creative audigy
2ZS to get sound. After a couple days of testing the performance of this
combination setup with some basice web surfing and reading email, video chat
on yahoo messenger and listen to music through window media player 11. I
found that the system freezed up sometime due to high CPU usage. Normally it
wouldn't be a problem with window xp. Especially when video chat and surfing
the web and have outlook opened. The system freezed for awhile due to much
processing in background and have to wait for awhile for it to get back to
normal. If I kept clicking or switching between applications it won't do
nothing but queue up the processes, even won't be able to bring up the
taskmanager to shutdown some application. I don't really know what caused it
either poor applications written for x64 or the vista itself performance
issue. and another thing is retarting and shutting down the system take at
least 5 to 10 mins. And starting up take at least 10mins for system
completing the starting up tasks plus sycn the superfetch and readyboost
drive. Now I am really afraid to reboot or install anything that required
restarting the system. Overall, multi-tasks on this system seems to be
problematic. If I performed well if I only surf the web, it will be overkill
for system like this just to surf the web, wouldn't it?. The quicktime
player also causing some memory buffer overflow shutdown itself. I don't
know if upgrading my system to vista was a good choice or not, but it was the
price to pay for being on the edge of new technology.