Hasta la VISTA baby...

BREAK_EM_OUT_JONES

EGO Is My Life!
so im just wondering if any of you have vista yet, and if you do, are there any problems with steam games??

Im thinking about upgrading but i want some peoples opinions before i re-format...
 
A couple of my buddies and I have been running Vista for quite sometime now, pretty much since it's release. I have been running it since Beta 1 and have had very good success (I am now running Ultimate 32bit and my buddies are running Home Premium). I ran into the first and only app so far earlier this week that gave me a little bit of grief. Command and Conquer 3 (which is amazing by the way) won't let you run unless you create a NEW account on the system with local admin rights. Even with UAC turned off and your existing account added to the local admin group, the app will puke at a certain point. I'm sure it's just a permission issue, but I’m too lazy to audit the system and find the source. The easy work around was to create a local admin account and then modify the C & C shortcut to do a "runas" with the newly created account - that way I don't have to log on and off. ALL Steam games that I play (HL:2, CS:S, DoD, DoD:S, Garys Mod, etc.) work GREAT without any noticable performance hit.

Bottom line - there is very little that Vista has to offer over XP other than heightened security and a very stunning visual interface (dreamscene is orgasmic). There are a few minor things that are nice to have, but nothing stellar. Of course, there is always DX10 support which will become more and more important and the Vista Media Center is WAY better than Media Center 2005.

Also note that most of the complaints you here from people about Vista are from two types of people – 1. People who aren’t actually running Vista or tried it for 30 seconds before deciding it sucked (it’s different, it will take some time to get used to). or 2. People who have junk hardware and are upset that Vista slows their system down or that there aren’t drivers for their off-brand sound card. If I hear one more person say "Vista sucks! It's so slow on my Celeron 2.4 w/128MB of RAM!" I'm going to scream.

If you have any Vista questions Outbreak – feel free to PM me.
 
ok well my step dad got a new laptop that came with a vista CD. He can install vista onto up to 3 computers with this CD so i can get vista for free.

How did your DOD run Jeffwa? was it like the video boojala posted?
 
ive been running vista buisness 64 bit for 2 or 3 months now and all i can say is that its 100% fine havent had any problems at all!
 
Vista in it self is basically windows xp without and major core software changes. All of the basic kernel processes are the exact same as as windows xp. However they have greatly improved on many of the subsystems over xp. The HAL as actually seen a very recent upgrade, and the native support for raw TCP/IP was also updated. The major change here being TCP window scaling. That and native support for IPv6. Dynamic kernel address space is also something nice to note about vista. What happens here is when you boot up your system, the kernel decides on how much space it is going to reserve for respective processes, drivers, cache, stacks, and its queues. Having a dynamic version of this will enable windows to (on the fly) change these global variables. Giving you more memory to work with. Other than the changes Jeffwa mentioned, there is a few more minor kernel additions that really don't make a huge difference. All in all, vista is definitely worth running if you have a copy :)
 
bob dole - the kernel has actually gone through some huge changes in Vista. I don't recall if they started from scratch or based it on the XP kernel, but I do know that there are major differences. Without going into all the boring details, the big things they changed are the way process threads are handled and huge changes in memory management. TechNet magazine has a great series of articles going on right now called "Inside the Vista Kernel" It can be viewed here - http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issues/2007/02/VistaKernel/

Outbreak - I'm not sure if you were asking about DoD or Dod:S, but both run fine on my system. The video was for DoD:S and I don't experience the problems in the video. Please note that the video was done on a release candidate of Vista, the first release candidate at that, and was using beta video drivers so I wouldn’t pay to much attention to it.
 
Well im not sure if my computer is good enough so here are my specs...

CPU: Intel 3.2 ghz
RAM:1024mb
NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 256mb

are these good enough??
 
I installed vista and when nVidia finally released G80 drivers a couple of months later, I tried to install them. Vista took that opportunity to decide my install of Vista wasn't genuine (which it most definitely was) and crashed. I reinstalled XP and haven't looked back.

IMHO, Vista is crap. Of course, I'm old and cynical, so you'll have to place your own value on my opinion of it.
 
Vista Ultimate 64-bit here.

It runs w/o error. All my software works. All my games work. Not wanting to bore people w/ how MS changed their hives or other base system changes I will say one thing.

Vista is great if you have a good PC. Do not try to run it on a system w/ less then 2 GB RAM (which, IMHO, no gamer should be doing anyway). Do not try to run it w/ a video card that uses shared memory unless you disable Aero and all the special effects. Other than that I like this OS even more than XP SP2. Having used every OS that MS has brought to market I can honestly say that Vista isn't as bad as everyone seems to think.

-D
 
[quote1177349285=deacon.DGX]
Vista is great if you have a good PC. Do not try to run it on a system w/ less then 2 GB RAM (which, IMHO, no gamer should be doing anyway). Do not try to run it w/ a video card that uses shared memory unless you disable Aero and all the special effects. Other than that I like this OS even more than XP SP2. Having used every OS that MS has brought to market I can honestly say that Vista isn't as bad as everyone seems to think.
[/quote1177349285]

Well put Deacon. One question for you - how has app compatability been with Vista 64bit? I know in XP 64bit it was horrible, so I'm curious how it is in Vista.

Outbreak - Personally I'd stick with XP considering your specs. It's not that Vista won't run on your system, but I think it will give the processor a run for it's money. If you don't mind rebuilding or have a spare HD laying around, I'd install Vista, but not activiate it, and see how it runs. If you like the performance, go with it.
 
Yeah, I agree with deacon. Vista is great. However you need some good hardware. 2 gb is a must. For HTPC, its great! It has a built in media center that has the codecs for Dolby Digital Live and DTS. However, one annoying problem I have is with xfire. I can't get the in game chat feature to work. I have a feeling its a driver issue though. I am running Home Premium x64. But it seems that other people have it working fine on their systems. The Fx5200/5500 is going to give you issues though. Nvidia recommends anything 6000 series and above, and atop that, it doesn't have the hdcp decoder for media viewing.
 
i don't currently own vista but i have to give people info on it about every day and i can tell you for sure is that it is a system hog...while steam will run on vista...you will notice a 10 - 15% decrease in your f.p.s.(frames per second)...that' s a little too big of a drop for my liking...my advice...stick with xp for a while until high-end vid cards like an 8800GTX comes way down in price.
 
[quote1179549831=meisster]
i don't currently own vista but i have to give people info on it about every day and i can tell you for sure is that it is a system hog...while steam will run on vista...you will notice a 10 - 15% decrease in your f.p.s.(frames per second)...that' s a little too big of a drop for my liking...my advice...stick with xp for a while until high-end vid cards like an 8800GTX comes way down in price.
[/quote1179549831]

Unless you're running some horrid system, you will NEVER see a 10 - 15% performance drop. As long as you're running a dual core processor, have a gig of RAM and a decent video card you will not see any noticable performance hit. If you do, something is wrong with your system.

A lot of people scream that Vista is a resource hog, this is somewhat true but mainly false. Yes, it uses more resources, but can you name a single OS upgrade that doesn't? However, the extent of that increase is marginal. One thing that people misunderstand is the way Vista manages memory. When people first get Vista they look at the amount of RAM in use they scream that Vista is using up all their memory. This is not entirely true - Vista uses completely different memory management than XP and pre-fetches memory to increase performance. When this memory is pre-fetched it looks like it is in use, however when it's needed it is immediatly made available. Pre-fetching is something that higher end workstations and servers have done for years - by pre-fetching the system is able to access the memory faster. Think of it like this - if you're in a library and need to read a page out of a book it will be much faster to open the book and find the page you need if it is in the palm of your hand compared to if you had to go find the book first.
 
imo, if an OS needs a dual-core processor to support its effects, it's quite a bit overkill...
for example, one can run linux and beryl without any newer-generation hardware (i run it with my poor little 1.6ghz pentium m, ati 9100 mobility and it runs smoothly ;) [which is also what i use to play DoD:S, unfortunately :(]).
 
Vista doesn't NEED a hardcore syste anymore than Linux does, BUT you will have a completely different experience with both OS's on sub-par hardware. People like to talk about how they can run Linux on ancient hardware. Yes, you can run Linux on an old 486DX2 with 64MB of RAM, but once you launch xwin you're going to be hurting pretty bad. Vista is no different. It will run on older hardware, but don't expect aero to run or the OS to perform at it's best.

I also don't feel that dual core processors are "overkill". We live in a world where technology changes weekly. Dual-core is now the standard as is a min of 1GB of memory. That's just the nature of the business.
 
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