Tomorrow I'm building a new machine, first one in 4 years. Core 2 Duo @3ghz, 2gb ddr800, 500gb in raid, 8800GTS 320mb.

So the big decision is whether or not to install vista. Current cons i have are:

1) The whole security adviser thing (which can be switched off yes?)
2) HDCP playing nasty games in the future
3) Generally slower than wxp, although this is abit less of an issue as this system should be ok
4) driver support

Pros

1) its new
2) supposedly handles pre fetching etc better, meaning a more responsive windows
3) going to have to install it eventually
4) its new

Also supposedly upgraded copies of wxp are slower than fresh installed vista.

So, thoughts anyone? Predominately I cruise around the net, play a few games here and there, encode videos for psp & some dv work. I was a big TA fan so hoping to get into supreme commander... although everyone seems to have a different opinion on whether that runs better or worse on vista.

Any thoughts from people running it?

You are coming to a sad realisation: Cancel or Allow? Allow..*sigh*

In short, no.

NOT

Just do it...Microsoft oh no wait thats nike

NOT

you'll do it eventually

all the same people who currently run XP were saying the same s*** 5 years ago in regard to 2k vs XP

Pros

1) its new

That is not a "Pro"

Why pay for the privilege of being a beta tester?

all the same people who currently run XP were saying the same s*** 5 years ago in regard to 2k vs XP

I confess, I said the same thing with 2k to Xp, but only because I was really happy with Win2k (and still would be using it if they were still supporting it, the dicks). But I've looked at Vista pretty extensively and all I see is reasons not to upgrade.

Especially if they're going to make games Vista-only - that means I've spent $300 on Windows 2000, which I can no longer run games on (or so I'm told?), $300 on Windows XP Pro, and at at LEAST another 300 on Vista if I have to upgrade to play the latest game.

I'll probably wait for at least a service pack before giving it a go.

sigh......i been running vista since november, the one released to partners with little or no problems. sure theres the occasional crash and some programs didnt have a vista update/patch (past tense, generally fine now). I've got a similar system but with 1tb raid and the gtx graphics card and runs like a dream. The only decent new game i have tried is sumpreme commander and on 1920x1200, 4xaa, all settings max, seamless.

Aside from the behind the scenes changes, its very purrrrty, including the dreamscene wallpaper (video as a wallpaper) which uses a little bit of cpu, then as soon as anything window, even just my computer, it stops the wallpaper.

The security "feature" is very annoying, and is just a matter of going into control panel->users->disable uaw.

should you use it? hell yes. no point dickn around with xp, you're just gonna install it in 3 months anyways.

Yeah thats what i figure.

Especially considering an upgraded copy of wxp runs like ass apparently.

The only way Microsoft can force people to upgrade - especially gamers - is by convincing software developers that there's enough of an install base of Vista for them to release it Vista-only. As soon as there are x,000,000 installs, they'll be able to do this.

The longer you go without installing Vista, the more you stop this from happening. The more you're forcing developers to look at supporting more platforms (like Linux and Mac OS X) with their titles.

Also supposedly upgraded copies of wxp are slower than fresh installed vista.

Is the upgrade version like 98's upgrade version where you can do a fresh install, it just asks you for a genuine ms cd during the install? Hasn't any "upgraded" os sucked compared to a fresh install? be it 98, 2k, xp etc.

I see it installed on machines everyday and the subsequent troubleshooting of it's lack of device support.

There is no way in hell I would recommend it until they have released a service pack for it Hell, one of my secondary systems is a P4 3.0 in a P4G8X Deluxe an even if I wanted to buy it, vista don't support the Si3112r controller, no support for the audigy 1 series either

Bottom line, stay away from VIA and from VIstA

If you MUST buy an OS (i.e. you have nothing better to use) then buy Vista, but if you have a copy of XP lying around at home, use that untill you actually want to use XP.

The longer you go without installing Vista, the more you stop this from happening. The more you're forcing developers to look at supporting more platforms (like Linux and Mac OS X) with their titles.

I don't get it, are you saying that's a bad thing? I'm a massive fan of supporting Linux as a gaming platform. If more companies would support it I'd switch in a second.

I see it installed on machines everyday and the subsequent troubleshooting of it's lack of device support.

Is it only new hardware? I have an old cusl2c motherboard and a p4c800 deluxe and both of them work fine under vista. Not that I use it on either of my computers.

woooaaaah cusl2c maaaan that brings back some memories, i havent seen one in years.

let me see, wasn't it THE P3 800 board? Asus fullsize, agp, the works for its time. And it was only like about $220 or so, cheap as.

Woah, thats like mid 2000 or something, when i first started building PCs for people.

I said it 98se to 2k ( still rekon 98se was the ducks nuts).
But 2k to xp I was all for it.

XP to Vista I see no benefits, just problems. All the percieved benefits are lame crap like a cool alt-tab interface *yawn* and a bunch of security crap that bugs you (A little common-sense pwns a phishing filter, spyware whatever, and threat detector... oh and yay for DRM and DEP on everything.

I don't get it, are you saying that's a bad thing? I'm a massive fan of supporting Linux as a gaming platform. If more companies would support it I'd switch in a second.

No

woooaaaah cusl2c maaaan that brings back some memories, i havent seen one in years.

aha! that's the MB I have in my linux box :) I was trying to remember it

I recently downgraded from Vista back to XP due to the s***ty driver support from creative and nvidia

1) The whole security adviser thing (which can be switched off yes?)

Its a check box, you go into the user panel and switch it off, then reboot. You never see it again.

2) HDCP playing nasty games in the future

Not sure about this because its in the future :)

3) Generally slower than wxp, although this is abit less of an issue as this system should be ok

On a brand new core duo machine, vista benched a tiny bit faster in 3dmark (thats all I tested :/) At home it runs great, and on my laptop. I notice no performance difference, and it seems to run faster, although that could be due to it being a fresh install.

4) driver support

Iv yet to run into an issue with drivers besides the creative one, but then Iv always had a lot of issues with creative. My XPS just worked, which I was really impressed about. My workstation needed nvidia drivers and nforce drivers for the chipset and graphics. I also had to get the SIL 3114 raid drivers to boot, but that is the same for XP.
Pros

1) its new

You get over that pretty fast :P

2) supposedly handles pre fetching etc better, meaning a more responsive windows

It does seem to allocate memory and resources a lot better, however its meant to be even better come SP1. I have a SP1 beta im going to try out on a spare machine when I get a chance.

3) going to have to install it eventually

Maybe


My advice is to run the upgrade advisor and get a copy from a friend. You can install it for a couple of months without entering a serial or activating (with ultimate anyway). See how you like it, run it for a month before you give up. They keep releasing patches which is making it better and the new dreamscene stuff is really cool.

IMO I think its a cool OS and has a lot of kool new little bits in the core and the interface. I havnt had any trouble at home. At work attached to the AD Im having quite a few problems. but at home, im happy enough with it.

Hmm yeah well going to put it on. Getting all the drivers etc atm. I'll post back tomorrow with some results ... cheers everyone.

The only way Microsoft can force people to upgrade - especially gamers - is by convincing software developers that there's enough of an install base of Vista for them to release it Vista-only.

Or they just stop supporting it and you get no more patches for security holes.

If the choice was to buy Vista or XP then I would buy Vista because you will have to eventually, whether it's in a year or 3 it will happen.

I recently had a new pc built (just a media player) and had Vista Home Premium installed on it to have a play around. So far I've had no problems with Vista, everything is working smoothly (it just took a couple of days to find my way around it though). I enjoy all the eye candy on it too (Chess Titans rocks!). I will be waiting though before I install it on my Games rig, I want to get a few patches under my belt.

I was looking at another pc tonight, but the motherboards on CA's website don't seem to have any HDMI audio output or anything so does that mean it's best to wait until everything comes out with HDMI support before getting a new PC or will it be another few years until that s*** gets standardized? (I upgrade once about every 4-5 years)

edit: I hate vista and wish to ignore/avoid it but know I can't do that forever and plan to use XP on the new machine, just that if I _HAVE_ to upgrade to vista later it would be nice to not have to buy another entire PC again.

last edited by whoop at 02:27:03 19/Mar/07

its got a few new things in it that are ok, but nothing to make me install it just yet.

ive got driver problems with current xp mce 2005 and all compatible hardware.

having said that, if i was starting from scratch and had new hardware, id deffo put it on.

The biggest issue I have with Vista is the Directsound change - since 99% games are based on Directsound and are expecting EAX hardware for surround sound, you'll get no more surround sound from games anymore.

Unless you buy a Creative card, and hope they one day fix/finish their OpenAL drivers.

At the moment i see no reason to rush out and start using Vista. If you do some reseach you will find more and more businesses have came to the same conclusion.

They are avoiding Vista and Office2007 as there are no advantages from upgrading and obvious disadvantages revolving around loss productivity and the cost required of upgrades.

There was also an article in the SMH today about Vista.

Vista Honeymoon is Over


last edited by ara at 10:32:04 19/Mar/07

Actually, we recently got an upgrade copy of vista for our media center (newer machine, it came with a coupon for it). I've thought about installing it, but sound driver support is probably the biggest holdback. Since there are obviously some vista users here, i've got a couple of questions...

1.Surround sound/dolby digital output/2 channel to 6 channel spreading, does vista screw any of these features up? (Assuming vista supports the hardware, of course.)

2.Is there any extra screwing around with media playback? Since it's the media centre or equivalent edition I assume that any DRM rubbish will be more prevalent than any other vista version.

I guess those are the two main things i'm worried about. Theres alot of anti-vista sentiment around, and alot of it is undoubtedly fiction, but not having had the opportunity (or the spare hardware) to install it yet, I can't say for myself.

i got Vista Ultimate wit my new laptop, if after a month or so I don't like it. IO can just put a fresh install of XP Pro on and sit it out for a while.

I certainly see no value in getting ANOTHER copy of XP!

DX10 ftw.

Took the plunge, feels pretty good so far. No driver issues or anything yet, definately a lot better than when i did the whole w2k then wxp thing.

my old man just got a new laptop with vista home on it & he couldn't get the networking to work with his home lan plus a few other niggling problems that he attributed to it being the 'home' version rather than ultimate or woteva they call it. he installed xp-pro & had no more problems. i've heard a few similar stories from other people as well that the issues they are having are more to do with thier installs not being ultimate vista... but it's so much more expensive!@#!@ :/

Vista is over-rated. I've been using it since it came out as beta for MS Partners and I have to say, it adds no noticeable benefit from the changeover. I continue using the final retail version (of course again courtesy of MS Partners Program) cause I couldn't be bothered re-rolling out my development PC again. All my other PC's in the house are still on XP and will be for many many moons to come.

Who cares what you have to say, your probably just some fat bastard.

Who cares what you have to say

Your mum :P

your probably just some fat bastard.

I try very hard to live up to my nick, especially the bastard part.

Still thumbs up, supreme commander runs pretty good getting 36fps average.

No driver / stability issues yet at all. Only thing i did find is mb was glitching with the FSB at 420, upping the voltage to the fsb & mch fixed it.

Only thing so far that hasn't worked properly is xvid4psp. So going to need to find a way around that.

I'm still having issues with file sharing on the machine that I dropped back from VISTA to XP Pro
Folders that I previously had shared with "read only" access under XP, then shared again with the same permissions under VISTA, now no longer allow an authenticated user to copy these files from my system. It's so freaking random.. It actually allows the user to think that it's copied the file then as it's finishing its write to disc on the remote machine, it fails stating
"Cannot copy X: Access is denied. The source file mat be in use"

I've uninstalled file an print sharing, set the permissions back to full access and even gone as fare as altering back to "simple file sharing" an it still doesn't allow a remote machine to copy a file. There is an article relating to this sort of thing happening under NT to 2K that relates to a registry setting that controls encryption that I haven't as yet found a relevant key in XP that does the same thing.

Beginning to make Hermie angry

not a trusted source?

my old man just got a new laptop with vista home on it & he couldn't get the networking to work with his home lan plus a few other niggling problems that he attributed to it being the 'home' version rather than ultimate or woteva they call it. he installed xp-pro & had no more problems. i've heard a few similar stories from other people as well that the issues they are having are more to do with thier installs not being ultimate vista... but it's so much more expensive!@#!@ :/

good thing he has an IT Professional in the family hah!

:P


I had no good reason to ditch Win2k to goto Windows XP, but I did all the same. It seemed that was where the IT biz was heading at the time, and let's face it - if you work with computers and you're not a naturally curious person you're f***ed. I didn't really want to ditch 2k, but as it turned out most of my customers (and the boss) were going to upgrade (shock horror) eventually so the payoff was there. I should have got in sooner in terms of dev tools and learning detailed fixes for (now basic) problems instead of opting for re-installs or the half-arsed fixes available from 'trusted sources' on the net of the day...

We're onto a whole new MS platform now. For some of us that have played the office politic game wisely, now is the time for hiring new n00bs to do our learning for us (and in due course we take credit for their good work).. for others - it's just a pain in the arse to endure yet another upgrade/platform/language/etc. Nothing has really changed - we're in for the same bug-fix/exploits/virus and spyware fun we've had for the last few or more years.

Meh.. XP is dead. Long live Windows Vista.

Meh.. XP is dead. Long live Windows Vista.

An here I was thinking of buying me a new Diamond sharpening Steel for my birthday ;)

/me plants dust bomb underneath koopz's work area instead