Vista Advisor

Microsoft has released a tool that will tell you if your current PC is up to snuff for Vista. Basically, your gaming rigs should be fine but if you've got something older you may want to run it.

I spend a fair amount of time with the vista beta.

Essentially, if you can play BF2 or Oblivion now without crying you will be fine.

If you struggle with Doom3 at 640, you will need to either;

Get up to 1G ram
Get to a current retail video card
Get over 2.8 Ghz

rabbit wrote:

I spend a fair amount of time with the vista beta.

Essentially, if you can play BF2 or Oblivion now without crying you will be fine.

If you struggle with Doom3 at 640, you will need to either;

Get up to 1G ram
Get to a current retail video card
Get over 2.8 Ghz

you forgot one..

Stick with consoles.

Well if you are going to get all smarmy on me (grin)...

Hey, when I can say, when I can play all the same games I want to play on my PC, I'll abandon upgrading my gaming PC for good. Alas, virtually every game I play on the PC isn't available on consoles (and every console game I play isn't available on the PC, with a few exceptions).

Oddly, its not the uber graphics headliners that don't make the bridge. I *love* flight simulator (which will use Vista stuff), and I play a lot of random non-mainstream games like Magic, Brettspielwelt, Puzzle Pirates... None of which require any kind of system to speak of, but do require a PC in the basement.

And the MMORPG chain addiction.

That webpage now says "Vista advisor beta is currently unavailable"

Well I can put the installer up on my site if you want, send me a PM.

I've been holding out on upgrading my PC. But between Vista and Spore, I don;t think I 'll be able to wait much longer...

I'm waiting until the last possible minute this time. I'm reasonably hot for a machine based on AGP, but there's not really an upgrade path left for me other than starting from scratch.

I figure the longer I wait, the cheaper/better I get.

rabbit wrote:

I'm waiting until the last possible minute this time. I'm reasonably hot for a machine based on AGP, but there's not really an upgrade path left for me other than starting from scratch.

I figure the longer I wait, the cheaper/better I get.

Same situation here. At least till the first must have game that runs on Vista only.

Edwin wrote:

Same situation here. At least till the first must have game that runs on Vista only.

Aren't the people that said the same thing about upgrading to XP still waiting?

XP is 8.97^33 times better than Win9x, IMO.
Every XP machine I've ever had/used/worked on has had zero downtime - not counting power outages to the house.

None.
It just works.

That said, I don't really need Vista at home, since I just mostly play WoW nowadays, so unless you have a lot of disposable income, I don't really see why you'd move to Vista at release or buy a computer for Vista now. To me, that'd be like buying a big flatpanel TV today because the PS3 is going to require a better TV than what you have currently - when it eventually comes out. I guess if you are on a really tight budget and need to know now how much of each paycheck you need to put away for the next 9 months so you can afford a PC and Vista next March, this might be a good tool. Personally, I think it's a great marketing tool that will sell more hardware between now and release than would normally be sold. Maybe it's MS way of paying back the partners for the delay.

Thanks, but I know my ol' clunker is unfit to run even Vista's logon screen, if it has one. I mean to build a new box when Vista finally comes out, or buy one with it preinstalled.

98SE to XP is quite different than XP to Vista. Does testing out Vista at work/home count?

Edwin wrote:

98SE to XP is quite different than XP to Vista. Does testing out Vista at work/home count?

Not sure I actually understand the last question?

But in terms of "difference" - well, sure, of course it's different. And depending on how you plan to use vista, it may or may not be dramatically different. There is a new driver model and graphics API. How much these matter to us as gamers is of course dependant on how manufacturers and developers choose to implement things.

Will there be a tone of DX10 games out of the gate? I doubt it. Will DX10 go backward compatible? Not that I've heard (love love to be wrong, but I don't *think* I am). DX10 is embedded pretty deeply into the new driver model. Will it matter? My prediction is not for a while. What DX10 *should* do, more than just make things pretty, is get load off the CPU. This is important because games are becoming increasingly CPU throttled - anyone who plays flight simulators knows this very well. But it will likely be a year or two after launch that it will matter.

Of course, if there's a must have title for you (in my case, FlightSim10) that really benefits from DX10, your die is already cast.