Safe to go from XP to Vista?
Dublo7
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I'm sort of thinking of going to Vista. I'm currently on XP Pro SP2.
Would it be safer to just do a clean install, or should I just do an upgrade? To be honest, I really can't be bothered formatting and reinstalling all my programs.
When I install Vista, should I install SP1 immediately?
Would it be safer to just do a clean install, or should I just do an upgrade? To be honest, I really can't be bothered formatting and reinstalling all my programs.
When I install Vista, should I install SP1 immediately?
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Just run Windows Update as some systems need special drivers before SP1 can be installed. Windows Update will install any needed updates including SP1 in a proper manner to prevent problems.
That is NOT the general consensus, XP is not better than Vista. Read here on performance. You should also try reading the actual story linked to by Gizmodo. That isn't Vista only, it also affects XP and Mac as well as other browser besides IE. Thought IE7 can be set to avoid the problems.
FYI, run the Vista compatibility tool before you obtain a copy or Vista. It can save your some trouble.
Core 2 Duo E4500 2.2ghz
8800gt
3gb (actually 4gb in there) DDR2 ram
It seems the general consensus is that it's now "safe" to switch to Vista. Vista had a lot of growing pains, and the product did feel pretty rushed. I know a few folks that had Vista sort of forced on them when they bought new computers. They generally didn't like Vista for a while but as time wore on I heard less and less complaining. A power user friend of mine upgraded to Vista the day it came out and didn't look back, but he's not a gamer (seems to be an issue for you) as he uses his 360 for his gaming. The eyecandy is nice, no doubt about it, but one person really disliked that MS seemed to spend so much time on the look and nowhere near enough time on the underlying issue of "it's a godamned operating system". I really doubt you'd be let down by the change and I would recommend a full reinstall of the OS (I would even recommend such an action to someone upgrading from OS X 10.4 to 10.5) just so you don't have that "shit, is the upgrade making this happen?" thought every time something doesn't work quite like you think it should. The 32/64bit question is a bit out of my league though, as the only person I know working on Vista64 had a lot of problems early on vis a vie drivers but I expect this to be solved now. I would look for 64-bit drivers before making the jump if that's the route you go to make sure everything is nicely supported.
My brother just built a new Vista comp and I get to see his confused agony regularly.
I forgot to add... the Mahjong is sweet, though!
As mentioned, hardly a consensus. Given a choice, I'd go with Vista hands-down. If that choice suddenly cost more (as in your situation), I might hold off. But most of the bad things you hear about Vista are just geek urban legends at this point.
Keep in mind that you don't necessarily need to make the choice at the register on this one. The license for Vista is good for either the 32-bit or 64-bit one, it's just a matter of which media you get (Ultimate comes with both). You can buy a 32-bit copy, track down a 64-bit disc, and install of the latter with your license key (or vice versa).
The biggest issue you'll likely hit is drivers for random hardware...I've got one item (external sound card) with no 64 drivers, so I stuck with 32. But most mainstream hardware is supported now. Look into it first.
Oh, and fresh install all the way.
The general consensus was that XP was better like, a year ago...
I bought Vista Home Premium (32bit) at launch and hated it enough that I dual booted XP for a long time and I just ran Vista for DX10 stuff (which is another issue not really Vista related). But later as Vista improved I dumped XP all together and when I built my new machine I just sent off for a 64 bit disc (all it cost was the shipping).
Very true. If it's going to cost you a fair bit to upgrade, it may be best to wait until Windows 7, which is due to be released in 2009/10. Even failing that release date (unlikely given what I hear about Sinofsky), the "Extended Support" period for XP will run from 2009 to 2014, so you'll be fine until the next Windows.
As mentioned, most of the problems with Vista have been fixed in the past year or so. You'll still find people who have or have had bad experiences with it, but there are less of the former these days (in my experience, at least).
Also, do you know which version of Vista you would be getting? If you're not sure, Home Premium seems to be a nice 'all-rounder'. If money is no issue, you might as well splurge and go for Ultimate.
Runs very nicely. I love how when something crashes (like my video driver) it just reboots that device and I can keep on playing.
Your machine will explode and kill your entire family.
Or at least that's what a bunch of idiots who don't know what they're talking about would lead you to believe.
DirectX 10? Heard of it?
Oh, and how's Dos working out for you? Every new operating system is bigger.
Perhaps, but some (e.g. early versions of Mac OSX as well as Snow Leopard if the rumors are to be believed) actually perform better than their early brethren.
By the way, what games currently available use/require DirectX 10? I'm genuinely curious as I haven't really kept up with it.
RBach: Any games that you remotely care about at all do not require DirectX 10. As for games which include a DirectX 10 option; BioShock, MS Flight Sim X, Assassin's Creed, and UT3 are the only ones which come to mind.
Looking at this list, that's a significant percentage of them, actually. I can't believe I forgot Crysis.
Dx10? Yeah, I think when the games you want to play require it, go ahead and buy vista. Every new OS is bigger. There's no avoiding upgrades in the long run, but it also makes a lot of sense to wait until the last possible moment - then the harware you're running is likely to be more powerful, and any performance hit you take is lessened.
FYI, I do have an old 486 running DOS for my retro gaming needs.
A few things have been inexplicably moved around, but this was also true of XP. It's not hard to get used to a few control panels being in different places. UAC is a bitch but you can disable it.
Also, get the 64-bit version so all of your RAM works. Good luck.
PS: If you have any janky old software or hardware that you still use, now is the time to use google to find out if they work in Vista.
You can crack DX10 software to run on XP, generally. Or add DX10 onto XP itself. Either way the games will run faster in XP than Vista, though the performance gap is considerably smaller these days. I'd say the lack of DX10 support in XP soured a lot of people on Vista right off the bat. Talk about a heavy-handed way of encouraging upgrades.
Anyway, he's right, if you're happy with XP there's not much call to upgrade to Vista.
If you're bored with XP and you can install Vista for nothing (and your time is free) then there's not much reason not to get Vista, either. I'd do a fresh install, though, because then you'll have both XP and Vista boot options available and if you don't like one you can use the other. Also, OS upgrades, especially with Windows, rarely are as clean as they should be. Haven't tried the XP-to-Vista upgrade but I somehow doubt it breaks out of the mold in this regard.
I've got Vista ultimate 64-bit dual-booting along XP. Drivers have drastically improved themselves and compatibility is almost a non-issue. I have to boot into XP to do something less and less these days (usually just to troubleshoot something alongside an XP user.)
I like the following about Vista. Things I like most nearer the top.
-support for more memory
-considerably less retarded networking
-MCE integration (with ultimate anyway, dunno about where it comes in on the other versions... I should hope it's integrated with all of them given MS's business plan for the next decade)
-icon previews for alt-tab etc.
-handles GPU crashes well (this would be higher but it's a rare occurrence)
-prettier default GUI
I hate the following about Vista. Things I hate most nearer the top.
-hard drive thrashing. It's half indexing, half system restore, and all stupid. Next time windows update sends you a 5mb patch and you reboot, load up the resource monitor and watch how many hundreds of megabytes windows reads/writes to your hard drive. Mostly there's no performance hit (or not one you notice) at all, just the annoying sound of hard drive activity when you know you aren't accessing anything on the drive. Though sometimes your system becomes a drunk sloth. Which will it be? Only the gods of windows know!
-new search. Indexed by default, yet doesn't index ALL files by default. No separate search field for file contents, instead search examines both names AND contents at the same time for the one field you've filled in. Unless you're searching non-indexed files. Then it doesn't bother looking at file content. Not that anything hints that this is the way your system is about to act. So then you have to go into your search options and set it to search the content of non-indexed files. But don't forget to turn that setting back to default when you're done, otherwise the next time you want to search non-indexed files but NOT their content, it's going to take a million years. Seriously, Microsoft. Name, Tags, Authors, but no field ONLY for Contents? Goddamn. Way to cripple the one redeeming feature of your search tool.
-no unsigned drivers for 64 bit vista. It's my OS, if I want custom drivers that you don't trust, tough shit for you. If I trust them, that should be good enough, because it's my fucking computer. Looked like this was easy to disable at first, but MS has patched each of those user methods consecutively.
Out of those three things, you can fix the first by turning off system restore (if you have your own backup images), the second by telling windows search to always look in non-indexed locations and always search file content --then only using windows search for content searches, and using another program (copernic desktop search for me) for everything else, and the third not at all, though you can mildly mitigate it by allowing unsigned drivers at boot every time you turn on your machine.
Overall I'm sufficiently pleased with Vista. At a certain level of hardware, the performance hit from XP to Vista is pretty minimal. I don't notice any difference in reliability (other than GPU recovery) or security, and I doubt anyone who's generally bothered to have a stable and safe system will either.
Does Vista 64 bit require 64 bit versions of applications?
16bit applications don't work on Vista x64. If you have some apps / games that you just can't live then you have some options. You can get DOS applications working by using DOS Box. You can also use Microsoft Virtual PC, which is free from MS to run XP or even 98SE if you want/need to.
It's a lot more than search and restore, besides you can adjust these settings. It's also timed defrag, also adjustable. As well as Windows Defender's daily scans.
Have you tried this under the new Search 4.0? Better, worse or the same? I could see how this would affect some people, but not me since I have it set to scan Names & Content so I usually fine what I'm looking for.
You seem to be confused here. It is your computer but it's their software that you are only licensed to use. The biggest cause of problems with running all Windows OSs are bad drivers, thank you nVidia. So while this does annoy me a bit as well I understand why they locked it to prevent conflicts.
Yeah, at the end of the day there's no real reason not to go 64-bit if you've got the hard drive space to run a virtual 98SE or 2000 machine if you run into issues with an application. Which you likely won't anyway.
Haven't tried search 4.0, if it's not in windows update it doesn't go on the machine. I have CDS as a general search tool because of it's very minimal resource use (it's also just a good search tool.) Changing the name/content settings for search is fine and leaving it on is what I do too, but a person shouldn't have to. Leaving both on means taking a performance hit and getting more results (and less of the ones you want), changing the settings to one or the other is awkward. If there's room for a tag field, there's room for a content field.
And I'm not confused. I still hate driver signing. I don't personally give two shits about an EULA either, if I buy software and want to dremel-launch it at hobos or fleeing children, I'm going to do just that, whatever Microsoft's opinion on the matter might be. The publishers involvement in my life stops when the money is in his hand and the software is in mine.
I don't see this mentioned yet, but if you actually want to use that last gb of ram, go to vista 64 bit.
I sincerely doubt that you were actually running Crysis with all of its DX10 features enabled on XP. And even if this were possible, you would need a machine with two high-end video cards and a fuckload of RAM to do so.
Also the hard drive "thrashing" is partly due to something called SuperFetch which actually makes programs load faster. I don't know what the problem is here -- Vista is doing things which will make your machine faster and more reliable, while you're not using it. It's not going to wear out your hard disk. If you are bothered by the noise then I would suggest buying a quieter hard disk.
You can enable "Very High" quality in XP with patches, this is correct. It doesn't fully enable DX10 features, but goes about 90% of the way towards approximating them using a DX9 path. There are things that DX10 can do that DX9 cannot, so if you look at a "patched" XP Very High vs. Vista Very High it will look different. However, DX9 can come very close.
One 4850 actually runs it on very high pretty well. Given that we're talking about Crysis, anyways. I'll let you guess how much memory the game had to play with in XP, but here's a hint: what's my favourite thing about Vista?
Dehumanized, out of curiosity what should I look for as noticeable differences?
Anyways, Vista does lots of disk writes while you're doing things, and if you take a look you can see the access happens (in my experience at least) at normal priority. It's not intended to bog things down and generally it doesn't, but it certainly does when Vista decides it's going to multi-task disk writes, or if something you're doing is involving constant read/writes, since any simultaneous writes to disk will degrade ALL hard drive performance severely.
Anyways, I turned off what I didn't need (system restore, which is also the biggest thrashing culprit with it's massive writes for minor changes) to increase performance. What's the problem? Obviously you like Vista, and you know, I like it too, but that doesn't mean I like everything about it.
Which reminds me of something else I don't like about Vista, but only because I expected MS would finally fix it: simultaneous file copies when multiple copy commands are executed instead of queued copying. But I hate it just as much about XP
http://www.tweakguides.com/images/Crysis_21b.jpg
http://www.tweakguides.com/images/Crysis_9a.jpg
http://www.tweakguides.com/images/Crysis_9b.jpg
Here's some comparison screenshots. I can't really tell what's going on there that might be DX10 vs. DX9 at work, it's hard to say what is due to slightly different environmental conditions and what is an illustration of what DX10 can do that DX9 can't.