Vista Ultimate

{OF}MadD! · 06-08-2007, 12:58 AM

Just bought a new box with vista ultimate in it......

Probably not a smart thing to do a week before the lan, boy do I have a learning curve and some growing pains to go through.

{OF}Blong · 06-08-2007, 04:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by {OF}MadD!

Just bought a new box with vista ultimate in it......

Probably not a smart thing to do a week before the lan, boy do I have a learning curve and some growing pains to go through.

lol dont feel bad. I have windows vista 32 bit on the laptop and im still learning after 2 months haha.

ChemicalWarrior · 06-08-2007, 01:40 PM

I love Vista, it is so much better than XP that it's not funny. Its much more stable, things make a lot more sense, a lot less just weird bugs. I've only had a few issues with compatibility and one of those wasn't really a compatibility issue.

1.) If you install Adobe Reader UAC must be enabled for the installation. If UAC is disabled during the install it'll give you a temp folder out of space error. You can however disable UAC again after the install and use Reader just fine.
2.) BF2 works fine except for me the game would not install if it was the CD version, DVD was fine just not CD. Plays just fine however once installed and I think I'm the only person who has had this issue.

Some notes:

Vista does not use up more memory, at least not as much as you think. Instead it uses a technique called SuperFetch that caches takes into memory and keeps them there till you need more memory for use. That's why it might say 1GB in use but in reality as soon as you fire up a memory hungry task that'll cut in half easily and you won't notice. This is the reason why Vista feels very snappy and responsive. It is a great feature, to bad people don't know about it and therefore think Vista is taking up double the memory when its not exactly doing that.

You can disable UAC by bring up msconfig (run-> type msconfig) and going to the Tools tab and then scrolling down, select Disable UAC and then click Launch and reboot. If you find UAC to not be the annoying then maybe you shouldn't worry, but I find it amazingly annoying and therefore it was disabled right away for me. Your computer is "technically" more insecure this way but I can live with the "fear". You can either search for the run ability or you can add it to the Start menu by right clicking the orb and choose properties and then Start Menu tab and select customize, then enable Run.

Keep the Start menu organized. I tend to dislike the new design and how everything is on top of each other. The first suggestion I'd have is create a new folder in there called Window Apps or similar and then put all of the included programs into this.

If its a gaming system or anything dealing with performance use, look for updated drivers monthly. As of now there is still a very slight gap in gaming performance between XP and Vista, this gap is closing tighter and tighter with each new driver release. Vista has a new driver model and some interesting way of doing things underneath, the performance will eventually come up to par with XP, maybe even surpass it at some point.

That's about it off the top of my head. If you have any questions or run int problems simply post. I've been through a lot of the growing pains of Vista so far. Unless you have some serious issues I think you'll find that Vista is actually a really good OS.

Soul · 06-08-2007, 02:05 PM

Chem, what is the state of nvidia drivers? Can I play games as well as I did in XP?

ChemicalWarrior · 06-08-2007, 02:40 PM

Should, drivers for the most part have improved a lot for Nvidia. The GeForce 8800 series still isn't great, but 7 or 6 series should be fine I would imagine. I don't pay a ton of attention to Nvidia drivers right now having a ATi card (though I hear the endless whining of how about X2900 drivers are... and they are).

{OF}MadD! · 06-08-2007, 03:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChemicalWarrior

Should, drivers for the most part have improved a lot for Nvidia. The GeForce 8800 series still isn't great, but 7 or 6 series should be fine I would imagine. I don't pay a ton of attention to Nvidia drivers right now having a ATi card (though I hear the endless whining of how about X2900 drivers are... and they are).

Thanks for the tips Chem!!!!!
Figures......I have the 8800 series......768MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX in my PC.

ChemicalWarrior · 06-08-2007, 05:16 PM

I would imagine you'll be dandy, most issues have been ironed out except for SLI rigs.

{DvT}JonahHex · 06-08-2007, 11:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChemicalWarrior

... except for SLI rigs.

...and the price. $300+ for a service pack.

ChemicalWarrior · 06-09-2007, 12:12 AM

Vista is A LOT more than a "service pack". To be honest, the enhnacements in the under belly of Vista are so far improved from XP that its not funny. The driver model is much better, the audio subsystem has very much increased (and hopefully will incourage game developers to use OpenAL), the kernel has been increased in so many ways, etc. The performance on Vista in every tasks in much better than XP. My system feels much more responsive than it did in XP and there are many people saying this as well. The SuperFetch I mentioned earlier, wonderful. There are some bugs, but this is to be expected. I don't recall any previous Windows installments that went so easily however. Sure, UAC is annoying but it can be disabled. The cost is the only real issue I can see, and it is over priced by that's what you pay to be on the bleeding edge. If you like XP then don't upgrade, you'll be missing out on things from many aspects. Also, just to clear it up, DirectX 10 could have been done on XP.... at a tremendous cost to Microsoft, basically rewriting the driver model... therefore that's why its Vista only.

{DvT}JonahHex · 06-16-2007, 11:34 AM

CW, I'd like to hear more of your thoughts on Vista.

A few days ago, being bored, I went to the M$ website and checked out their "100 Reasons You'll Be Speechless" webpage in which they tout Vista under the heading "Seeing Windows Vista for the first time may leave you searching for words. Many people just say “Wow.” Here are 100 reasons why." I opened a blank Notepad doc and "replied" to all 100 reasons. Of the 100, there were less than a 1/2 dozen that were of any particular interest to me. My "replies" were all personal: how their claimed attributes applied to me, my interests, the way I use my computer; I did not try to make my comments potentially applicable to interests that others may have.

The one feature of Vista in which I know I have an interest is DirectX10...it was #88 in their list.

OTOH, you have piqued my interest in talking about the underbelly of Vista, a topic that is virtually ignored by M$ and the "pundits."

Quote:

The performance on Vista in every tasks in much better than XP.

Can you elaborate upon this? Examples maybe?

[If you are interested, my replies to Vista marketing's 100 reasons are here. In order to make sense of them, you need to go to the M$ webpage, read their "reason #1" and then my "answer #1" and so on. I would expect that only the really interested or the truly bored would actually do this. The short version is: virtually all of the marketing is based upon solutions in search of problems.]