Now that Windows Vista has been released, PC resellers are falling over themselves to sell the first systems with the OS preinstalled. Many have offered Vista as a free upgrade from Windows XP, redeemable through a voucher scheme once 30 January 2007 passes, but it's preferable to have Vista running from day one.

One side effect of this Vista frenzy is the redrawing of the boundaries that define entry-level, mid-range and high-end PCs. What was a high-end XP machine becomes a more midrange Vista system, because the OS gobbles up a lot more resources than its predecessors.

Vista's main victim is your memory. 2GB of RAM would provide a computing experience totally free of disk swapping under normal XP use, but this is not the case under Vista.

The OS uses up roughly 800MB, and then - once a few applications, browser windows, and a system tray with a few background applications are present - the familiar disk crunching will make a comeback.

This is relevant to the Zoostorm, since the specification list includes a Core 2 E6400 CPU, 2GB DDR2 RAM, and an Nvidia 7600GT, running Windows Vista Home Premium. If this PC were running XP, performance would be flying, but an experience index rating of 4.1 in Vista points to a more sedate operating speed.

Vista-friendly

Nevertheless, Vista runs Aero in all its glory on the Zoostorm, thanks to the 7600GT GPU. This graphics card is by no longer top of the line for gamers and is no longer our midrange performance champion, but most titles will still run with detail turned up, although perhaps not the maximum settings with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering as high as they can go.

It is still the weakest point in the Zoostorm's feature list, if you consider better performing options available at similar price points. Still, once it becomes a bit long in the tooth, there is always the option of upgrading later. Benchmarking Vista is still a tricky task.

Many benchmarks don't run at all, while other benchmarks such as 3DMark06 and the Sandra suite run fine, albeit after patches.

Currently, the biggest reason for performance discrepancies between XP and Vista is maturity of drivers, especially Nvidia's Forceware driver. This means we should expect performance to improve over time as new drivers get released.