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Switch to Vista?
hoju
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Hey all did a search for Windows Vista and didn't see what I was looking for figured I'd ask a new question.
Currently building a new PC and I was contemplating making the switch to Vista. The new box will have 4GB Ram and from what I believe, that's the MAX that XP can support? Is switching a good idea? I've seen the Mojave commercials and all that, but I've also heard negative reviews from pretty much all my friends + my limited experience with the OS. This box will be for gaming and so I guess DirectX 10 stuff is important to me, is non-Vista DirectX a thing of the past now? Should I just install XP64 or should I take the plunge for Vista?
Thanks!
Currently building a new PC and I was contemplating making the switch to Vista. The new box will have 4GB Ram and from what I believe, that's the MAX that XP can support? Is switching a good idea? I've seen the Mojave commercials and all that, but I've also heard negative reviews from pretty much all my friends + my limited experience with the OS. This box will be for gaming and so I guess DirectX 10 stuff is important to me, is non-Vista DirectX a thing of the past now? Should I just install XP64 or should I take the plunge for Vista?
Thanks!
hoju on
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Honestly, I was given Vista for free through my University and I don't think I'd go back to XP. The first little while it'll be a pain because you're not used to it, but it's a damn fine OS.
At this point there's really no reason not to work Vista unless you're running specialty hardware.
I personally have a ton of problems with vista both at launch and within the past two months when I wanted to retry it. I will probably continue to use it when I build my next pc which I expect to handle DX10 well (currently I do not have a dx10 card).
I would go Vista. Home Premium 64 is probably your best bet. I've been running it since November and have experienced no trouble with it at all. Once I got it set up I never experienced a single crash requiring a reboot. I really don't know what all the fuss is about.
DirectX10 isn't completely necessary, and only a few games run it so far, but it is going to be the gold standard of most games in the next few years, so having XP means running crippled versions of all the new stuff.
If XP64 support is lacking as you say I think there's only one choice. Plus I totally want to get the new Crysis game so it looks like Vista is the only choice!
But to be fair I'd be curious what downsides people see, other than cost.
Check out "How to Break Into the Industry. Any Industry."
"I thought this was solid and I will shamelessly steal it. Hope you don’t mind." ..... Paul Barnett, Design Manager of Warhammer Online
Any RAM in the system is added to the equation. It all has to be addressable and that's where the limit comes in (32 bit processors can only have an address 32 bits long, whereas a 64 bit processor can address RAM with a 64 bit word length).
Anyway, I've been running Vista64 Home Premium for over a year now and think it's awesome. I much prefer it to XP. The only game I've had trouble running was Neverwinter Nights 2 - the installer does not work in Vista. Otherwise, some games that aren't supposed to run, like The Movies, run fine, you'll just have to try it out. It's fast and I've yet to see performance hits from bloating.
tl;dr -
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Also, is 2 gigs too little for Vista? I've heard it's quite a memory hog.
This is incorrect. System memory is separately addressed in the system from video memory. A system with 4GB of RAM and 512MB of video RAM on an add on card will show 3.5GB installed memory in a 32 bit OS. The video subsystem will show the 512MB of RAM on the video card. The two are not tied together except in cheap onboard video chipsets that use a portion of system RAM as video memory.
That's what he said.
No, really. That's exactly what he said. He never mentioned anything about system RAM = graphics RAM, just the addressing limitation.
The system needs to know how to address that memory space somehow - and it does that by chopping the top end of that 32-bit address space off. If you installed 2x1GB cards in SLI, you'd have 2GB of addressable system RAM.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Your first sentence and the following paragraph do not match up.
But as is you will probably have more problems from XP64 than you will Vista64.
actually you'll have 3GB system RAM, since SLI'd (or Crossfired) cards duplicate each others' RAM contents. No joke. That's why the 4870X2 has two gigabytes of RAM on it; it can really only use one.
I misread his post. I stand corrected.
Get 64 bit Vista and never look back.
Avoid Creative sound cards like the plague, and make sure you research any wireless card you may be thinking of and make sure it has drivers. I'm not saying you can't get either of those to work, but it can be a pain. I had all kinds of of sound glitches and and volume problems until I just took the creative card out and went with my on-board. I still get 5.1 and games still think I'm using hardware acceleration, so it's all good. Has an occasional bit of popping when alt-tabbing or something, but until I can afford something else, it's better than what was happening.
With my wireless device, I have a USB linksys dealy that I bought when I was using 32 bit (I got a copy of Ultimate and it has keys for both). It had some issues with 32 bit that I just overlooked at the time. Eventually just started using a wire, it's better anyway if you don't move your shit around all the time. Then after I switched to 64 bit I wound up moving into a situation where I couldn't get a wire to my comp, so I pulled out the USB device again. Lo and behold, linksys has no 64 bit drivers. I looked (very briefly, so I may have just been missing it) around and couldn't find many linksys devices that do have 64 bit drivers. As I was researching other brands, I stumbled upon a set of hacked drivers for the USB thing and decided to just go with those. They occasionally require me to restart to get a connection and have caused the only BSOD's I've had on this machine, but they work for the moment. I guess the moral here is don't get a linksys USB wireless device.
Those are the only two problems I've had with Vista in almost 18 months of use, and I blame the manufacturers for those.
I got a copy of 64-bit Vista Enterprise from my university and it works fine. No problems at all with any of my hardware, just make sure you research their drivers before you buy.
Not saying lots of people haven't had problems, but my Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer has been pretty well problem free from Day 1.
I'm starting to seriously think I got luck with my system. :P
But, but.. the man from the Mac comercials said...
I have an X-Fi card and I'm thinking of going from 32 to 64, I've heard they have problems, has that been fixed with SP1?
It's not so much that you ca't get creative cards working, it's that they will likely have all kinds of small annoyances that will eventually drive you up the wall. For me, games would randomly not detect the card and only provide software sound, which usually sounded like shit with large amounts of static and missing voices. I would also have problems with my microphone. Getting it muted in the windows control panel and at 150% volume in the device settings, while disabling certain ports that weren't even on the card in the creative panel, got to be a pain in the ass. Especially since a week later they would randomly switch and I would have to figure it out all over again (as in, a week later, wholly different settings would be required).
It might have been fixed with SP1 or with driver updates. I wouldn't know since I gave my card to a friend that still uses XP. I personally doubt SP1 fixed anything though, as the problems were totally in creative's drivers. Other brands using X-Fi chips were reported to work perfectly well with the new sound architecture. So unless creative got off their ass, I would be wary. It's been my impression that they have not, in fact, gotten off their asses.
Bolded to point out that the rest is speculation on my part. I haven't paid a lot of attention since I got rid of my card.
For the record, this was with an X-Fi Xtreme Gamer as well. If it was me building the new computer, I would build it without the sound card, and try it with onboard sound. Most modern mobo's work pretty well with it as far as I've heard. I would only bother researching a sound card if I didn't like what I was getting.
I went back to XP 64-bit, since other than bells and whistles, it recognizes all of my RAM and runs perfectly fine.
But yes, shitty nVidia drivers plagued Vista's early months. I'm told they've gotten much better. (I couldn't tell you for sure right now, because I'm using an ATi card.)
I....I feel like I should put you in a glass jar and study you.
2 Gigs is enough and you heard slightly wrong.
Vista does use more memory than XP. Just like XP uses more memory than 2000 and 2000 more than 98 and 98 more than 3.1.
However
Vista appears to be using a metric fuckton of memory because of system paging. Also Vista appears to be running far slower than anything ever in the first week or so because it's building its page file.
Copypasta in spoiler from http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/03/29/windows-vista-superfetch-readyboost.aspx
OK, so how is RAM usage affected? You may have noticed that Vista tends to use a much greater percentage of system RAM than on Windows XP. It is not uncommon to view Task Manager on a Vista machine with several GB of RAM installed and less than 100MB of the RAM shows up as free. For instance, here is a screenshot of Task Manager from the machine I am working on now.
As you can see, this machine has 4gb of RAM and is only using about 2.2gb considering the applications I have open (I'm currently running Outlook 2007, Word 2007, Windows Live Writer Beta, several instances of IE7 with multiple tabs open and some of my day to day tools) however it shows free physical memory of just 59MB. At first glance, this would seem to be something to worry about and this tends to make people a bit nervous, but once you consider the impact of SuperFetch this condition becomes less of a concern.
Many people tend to think of RAM as some sort of resource, and when it starts getting used up, they believe that they have a problem. In reality however, RAM is more like a cache. If your system is only using a small percentage of your cache is a huge waste. Imagine how your processor would work if its L2 cache never used more than 25% of its capacity. L2 cache is a small amount of high-speed memory that allows for high-speed access to the system's most commonly accessed data.
In previous versions of Windows, the Prefetcher wasn’t very aggressive in populating RAM. With Windows Vista however, SuperFetch tries its best to use as much RAM as it can, because if you have it you might as well make use of it.
As you may notice in the screenshot above, it only shows about 2.2GB of RAM used, yet doesn’t show the remainder as free. This is because the data in the cache is considered very low priority and any process that comes in and needs to use RAM will flush this data out transparently to the user or process. So, the memory is being used, but as far as the processes are concerned, it is empty. So what this boils down to is that even if you see that you have very little physical memory free, it is most likely nothing to worry about, it is just SuperFetch working.
tl;dr - "So what this boils down to is that even if you see that you have very little physical memory free, it is most likely nothing to worry about, it is just SuperFetch working."
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
also when I had vista my creative card worked fine.
with that said, the only thing that made me switch back down to XP64 was the fact that I couldn't find my vista disk when I was reinstalling the OS after my RAM died.
please don't think the universe is unfolding or anything. . .
XP gives much better performance in Multimedia and Gaming.
Wait for the next Window.
Vista is just another WinME.
Yeah, I bet you'd totally dig Mojave.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
That being said, Vista still easily uses around 700-900 megs by itself, but 2 gigs of cheap DDR2 will work pretty well. I gamed that way for a long time. 4 gigs and you'll never have think about it, though. At least not for another year or so. 8 gigs and your golden.
As a side note, DDR2 is dirt cheap nowadays. DDR3 is still pretty expensive though. I say go for quantity over speed in this case. My mobo won't run 4 gigs at 800mhz, so I had to downclock it to 667, but I still got 5-10 more fps in Crysis on Ultra-High, not to mention better load times. Much better performance in day to day stuff as well.
Edit: Fuck you guys and your working Creative cards. Making me want to get my card back and shit. Bastards.
I'm also surprised we got through a page without some "Vista is ME 2.0" comment. Go team.
Oh hey last years snap reaction that has been wrong for months now. I thought we wouldn't be seeing you around these parts anymore.
Yes so superior that my games run slower and uses more resources in Vista.
Yeah so whatever you've done to your system, or whatever you run under Vista that you don't run under XP that slants your perception?
Not actually Vista's fault.
Turn that shit off and I didn't notice a speed difference between Vista and XP on my old laptop that I used for testing that stuff.
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
But they were there that one week I wanted to keep an eye on a secondary hard-drives free space, so I guess it isn't all bad.
Man I've got my widgets on and don't seem to have any problem gaming.
Well, I don't notice the difference now that I've got four gigs of RAM and a Core 2 Duo, but on my ancient single-core Athlon 64 laptop with 1GB of RAM, it was noticeable.
edit: then again, this was also before SP1 came out.