19 April 2007, 9:12 PM
I am a Vista user.
Seems I'm the first person in this thread to say this. Looks like this is just another of those many Microsoft-bashing, Vista-trash-talking forum topics that have been around all over the net, but again nobody is commenting on Vista from their own experience (except Geass). But I'll do that now: In two and a half weeks I have explored and used Vista on my own computer since I got rid of XP and completely replaced it with Vista. I have the following basic specs:
Athlon 64 3000+
2 GB DDR-RAM
GeForce 6800 GT (AGP)
SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum
280 GB total hard disk space
Vista was finished installing after 30 minutes and has been running fine ever since. I can work with it, lots of the stuff they changed is now easier to access than on XP, you don't have as much to configure after the first boot because MS actually streamlined the OS a bit. That's not to say that there aren't any leftovers you wouldn't turn off, but turning off things does hardly require registry edits or tweaking tools any longer; it can all be done from the Control Panel. Setting autorun commands, associating file types to programs, uninstalling software, configuring the sound card and user interface, it's all much more comfortable once you have seen how it works now. I cannot imagine how people could find that it's slower to work with Vista's user interface.
Now about performance and stability. I have the 64 bit version of Home Premium (the only sensible version you could get for money; Ultimate really is not a requirement unless you want all the Business features) and it has never crashed on me. 64 bits allows the system to run a few extra security algorithms that require the additional registers on the 64 bit CPU. Such security measures include hardware-operated file system protection, randomized boot-up system file access (i.e. it moves the system files to different memory addresses on each boot), and increased stability. Other than that, it won't really matter unless you run a 64 bit application, but games using 64 bits have been sparse so far. Drivers need to be fully 64 bit compliant and drivers are also the #1 cause of ALL gaming problems Vista users are facing. The OS is faster and more clever than you might think; it caches and indexes your files and programs to make them run faster depending on your work or gaming habits. RAM usage is also not such an issue if you have 1+ GB (Vista does use more RAM than XP, but it can also free up that RAM to provide it for games, or use a USB flash drive to cache files you don't access right now). When a game crashes or runs poorly, it really has to do with the Vista drivers (32 and 64 bit) that hardware manufacturers are offering so far. I'm running NVIDIA beta drivers since the last WHQL release performed sub-par on my system. They release new beta drivers about once in two weeks with visible improvements. My sound card is currently the only one supporting surround sound and EAX in games that use OpenAL, and drivers for it come much slower than NVIDIA's. It's a shame that the hardware companies still don't have finished drivers ready almost three months after Vista's launch (they had enough time during the beta tests to program drivers), but once drivers are stable and feature-complete, Vista will probably be a much more attractive gaming platform than you might think now. DirectX 10 games require Vista anyway, so there's nothing to discuss about that really, and Vista can use PCI Express and Dual Core CPUs more effectively than XP since it was written for these technologies. You can only update XP for so long; at some point an OS switch is necessary to keep up with technology.
Since Vista or my video drivers do seem to have a problem with my current motherboard, I'm actually upgrading it and the video card this week. I planned to do that along with the Vista switch, so it's all one transition process for me. If you plan not to upgrade your hardware in 2007 and you are on the lower end of Vista's system requirements, that's a perfect reason to stay with XP. But Vista is not bad at all, go ahead and TRY it before you believe the (negative) hype.
Desktop Screenshot
Seems I'm the first person in this thread to say this. Looks like this is just another of those many Microsoft-bashing, Vista-trash-talking forum topics that have been around all over the net, but again nobody is commenting on Vista from their own experience (except Geass). But I'll do that now: In two and a half weeks I have explored and used Vista on my own computer since I got rid of XP and completely replaced it with Vista. I have the following basic specs:
Athlon 64 3000+
2 GB DDR-RAM
GeForce 6800 GT (AGP)
SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum
280 GB total hard disk space
Vista was finished installing after 30 minutes and has been running fine ever since. I can work with it, lots of the stuff they changed is now easier to access than on XP, you don't have as much to configure after the first boot because MS actually streamlined the OS a bit. That's not to say that there aren't any leftovers you wouldn't turn off, but turning off things does hardly require registry edits or tweaking tools any longer; it can all be done from the Control Panel. Setting autorun commands, associating file types to programs, uninstalling software, configuring the sound card and user interface, it's all much more comfortable once you have seen how it works now. I cannot imagine how people could find that it's slower to work with Vista's user interface.
Now about performance and stability. I have the 64 bit version of Home Premium (the only sensible version you could get for money; Ultimate really is not a requirement unless you want all the Business features) and it has never crashed on me. 64 bits allows the system to run a few extra security algorithms that require the additional registers on the 64 bit CPU. Such security measures include hardware-operated file system protection, randomized boot-up system file access (i.e. it moves the system files to different memory addresses on each boot), and increased stability. Other than that, it won't really matter unless you run a 64 bit application, but games using 64 bits have been sparse so far. Drivers need to be fully 64 bit compliant and drivers are also the #1 cause of ALL gaming problems Vista users are facing. The OS is faster and more clever than you might think; it caches and indexes your files and programs to make them run faster depending on your work or gaming habits. RAM usage is also not such an issue if you have 1+ GB (Vista does use more RAM than XP, but it can also free up that RAM to provide it for games, or use a USB flash drive to cache files you don't access right now). When a game crashes or runs poorly, it really has to do with the Vista drivers (32 and 64 bit) that hardware manufacturers are offering so far. I'm running NVIDIA beta drivers since the last WHQL release performed sub-par on my system. They release new beta drivers about once in two weeks with visible improvements. My sound card is currently the only one supporting surround sound and EAX in games that use OpenAL, and drivers for it come much slower than NVIDIA's. It's a shame that the hardware companies still don't have finished drivers ready almost three months after Vista's launch (they had enough time during the beta tests to program drivers), but once drivers are stable and feature-complete, Vista will probably be a much more attractive gaming platform than you might think now. DirectX 10 games require Vista anyway, so there's nothing to discuss about that really, and Vista can use PCI Express and Dual Core CPUs more effectively than XP since it was written for these technologies. You can only update XP for so long; at some point an OS switch is necessary to keep up with technology.
Since Vista or my video drivers do seem to have a problem with my current motherboard, I'm actually upgrading it and the video card this week. I planned to do that along with the Vista switch, so it's all one transition process for me. If you plan not to upgrade your hardware in 2007 and you are on the lower end of Vista's system requirements, that's a perfect reason to stay with XP. But Vista is not bad at all, go ahead and TRY it before you believe the (negative) hype.
Desktop Screenshot