Windows Vista Catch-All

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It would seem that operating system threads continue to be on par with discussing religion and politics for many of us. I'm tired of watching what should be useful, informative threads devolve into personal arguments without any hope of resolution. This new thread has a few rules:

1) No personal attacks, this includes telling someone they're wrong without any facts to explain why.

2) This thread is about Windows Vista, not anti-trust issues or why Microsoft is evil.

3) Stay on topic. If you want to discuss why Linux, OSX, BeOS, etc. is better, start a new thread. However, there are plenty of questions surrounding the switch from XP to Vista so that's still on the table.

4) No personal attacks. I'm serious. This thread will hold every participant to a higher standard than usual. I will never lock it, but I will edit posts if they enter into personal attacks or trolling territory. If I have to edit someone's posts too much, banning is a very real possibility.

Everyone on this site shares in the responsibility for making it a respite from the troubles and stress in our daily lives rather than something that adds to them. The ONLY control you have in aiding or abetting this is what you type in the box before you hit submit. Think about what you're doing and remember that what you put out there always dictates what you get back.

I've got Vista running on a seperate partition right now so I've been dual-booting. I pop in once in a while, but Steam just doesn't want to behave on there like it does on XP. I think it knows I'm not fully committed yet so it's throwing tantrums. I'm going to try and make it my primary once SP1 is officially released since I'm not even sure if I managed to install the beta service pack properly. I ran the file to enable it, then ran Windows Update but it never seemed to take.

rabbit mentioned he's been running it without a crash or reboot in weeks. He even said he'll suspend the machine with WoW running before he goes to bed. He wakes up, flips the computer back on and within 15 seconds he's staring at the WoW starting screen. Pretty cool.

Vista fights for its life!

My wife bought a dell laptop last year, that she was dual-booting with vista and ubuntu. She has been mostly unhappy with vista, and last month finally decided to install XP home instead (we have 3 or 4 licenses for XP home, but all of our discs no longer work, so we had to obtain a copy online). She tried installing off the disc, but ended up with a blue-screen each time before the install could begin. I thought perhaps it was a bad burn at first, but it had no issues with getting to the stage of starting the installation on either of our desktop machines. Eventually I booted into ubuntu, and blew everything up with gparted; after that XP installed with no issues. The quick and dirty google search I did didn't turn up anyone with the same issue (but it was a very quick search). Has anyone else seen/heard of something similar happening? I'm curious as to whether it was really a vista issue, or some strangeness to do with the laptop itself.

Actually, I think the biggest crime with Vista right now is that some store bought or pre-built machines are standard with Vista Home 32-bit edition. That just seems like a huge gotcha for the ill-informed.

I have ultimate running on a Toshiba laptop we bought recently (I had to do a fresh install since the laptop came with HPrem), it's Windows. I've not had any issues with it other than some 'where is this thing now?' type stuff but I've also been trying (and succeeding) to not just switch to the Classic Windows theme. Besides my favorite XP hack still works, control userpasswords2.

As for the 32-bit and the 3GB ram issue, most places are now maxing out their ram at 3gb to get around explaining the whole limitation. It's not like the 4th GB is a total waste, they can always upgrade to 64-bit if they feel that strongly about it.

As for the other boxes at home, my main machine may get it after the official release of SP1 but that's really the only other PC capable of running it in the house that isn't a server. I do hope to build a HTPC with ultimate sometime in the next year though.

I got a steal on home premium and set up dual boot on two drives. I have yet to boot back into XP or something, and the only actual rebooting of vista I've had to do i when I update a driver - it's just in standby all the time. It's been 100 percent rock solid for me, and the one or two hiccups I have had (steam) have been silod and not affected anything else. I've been running the beta SP1 since it was released.

A few notes:

- Stardock UI stuff, in particular objectdock, works absolutely perfectly and better than XP in terms of performace.
- Synergy, which I use so I can use one mouse and keyboard across two machines with fourscreens is FAR more stable under Vista than it was in XP.
- Multitasking is way better than it was in XP - I can have WoW, Sins, email, my browser, and various other apps just chugging along without ever having any issues. Alt-tabbing from full screen games actually works reeliably now.
- The XiFi drivers are total crap. My sound is ass. Randomly will get noisy, scratchy, etc. I generally an solve this just by disabling andrenabling, haven't had to reboot.
- I turned of uac first thing and I am very glad I did. How annoying is that.
- I hate the file dialog boxes, and if anyone knows how to make them, you know, functional, like on XP, Linux or a Mac, let me know.

absurddoctor wrote:

Vista fights for its life!

My wife bought a dell laptop last year, that she was dual-booting with vista and ubuntu. She has been mostly unhappy with vista, and last month finally decided to install XP home instead (we have 3 or 4 licenses for XP home, but all of our discs no longer work, so we had to obtain a copy online). She tried installing off the disc, but ended up with a blue-screen each time before the install could begin. I thought perhaps it was a bad burn at first, but it had no issues with getting to the stage of starting the installation on either of our desktop machines. Eventually I booted into ubuntu, and blew everything up with gparted; after that XP installed with no issues. The quick and dirty google search I did didn't turn up anyone with the same issue (but it was a very quick search). Has anyone else seen/heard of something similar happening? I'm curious as to whether it was really a vista issue, or some strangeness to do with the laptop itself.

There are odd things on Dell laptops with Media Direct, as it's installed in a hidden partition which can screw the partition tables if altered. The media button is known as the 'self destruct' button on some forums If this sounds like it may be the issue, PM me and I'll send you some information as I recently went though getting around the same issues.

I went into a little bit on the other thread, but I'm not sure I would be able to recommend anyone upgrade from XP sp2 to Vista. Note that my experiences with Vista are limited to Home Premium.

I haven't had any issues with my Vista install, after I spent a few days tweaking it - in fact, I'm pretty happy with where it is now, in terms of solidity. However, I have the same solidity on my XP machine, with a fifth of the memory overhead. I wouldn't recommending running Vista without 3GB of ram (which I have, and it runs very smoothly). XP, in contrast, is pretty happy with 1GB.

So yes, I'm not seeing any reason for someone to move up. Maybe after SP1 for Vista that may change, but we'll see.

For reference, I've played Portal, Sins of a Solar Empire, EU3 and Fallout2 all on Vista without any problems, so it seems like I haven't had the same issues some others have had.

Oh, one more thing - the lack of RDP on Vista Home Premium is obnoxious.

Hear hear for civility!

Sorry fellas, but I'm going to make you cry now with a rather lengthy post on my opinion: (sorry!)

The X-FI drivers do need more attention and the ALchemy application which re-routes the software sound calls to the HW accelerated OpenAL system works half the time and other times I have noticed instablity with certain games such as Bioshock, which crashes when the EAX is enabled, only for it to work fine after it is once again disabled.

That whole issue comes from the fact that Directsound has been used by Microsoft for so many years because they wanted that to be used as the de facto standard, and then they, much to a far few people's surprise embrace OpenAL, but to leave out HW support for the legacy directsound used by so many games and indeed applications (Adobe Audition which I play with often springs to mind, to an extent that can be sorted with ASIO4ALL) seems very odd.

Time will tell if the OpenAL standard will be embraced by the software makers....(cue dastardly music)

For some strange reason, windows explorer reacts better when aero is off and it's just the basic theme enabled. I know you need a beefy system to make use of Vista, however I thought this more than caters for such an OS:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz
4GB DDR2 RAM
Geforce 8800GTX 768MB
Sound Blaster X-Fi
2 beefy in terms of size hard drives (total just under 1.4TB)

all towards a nice shiny Dell 24in Widescreen thingy.

Now that willy waving is over with, I'll carry on. The PC is not only the games machine, It is the full entertainment system, which I in turn use to watch a lot of films, listen to music, video conference, produce podcasts and enjoy some content from the BBC flash-based Iplayer. I am one of the few people to bother with Media Center on a custom built PC, from what other people say to me, though I know that's wrong due to Media centers being used being a fair number of people's homes.

But anyway I need media center functionality because I have the Remote Control for the system, and it's nice to lounge back once in a while on the settee and use the remote to navigate some mp3 folders for things.

The best implementation of Media Center I have to say is in Vista x64. Yep, that version of Media Center for speed and response to browsing folders looking while it's still cataloging and producing Covers for the files is great. The only thing that lets it down is that fact that there are no offical 64-bit codecs from Divx for instance, or 64-bit DVD playback codecs from Cyberlink or Intervideo, whoever the players are. In fact that is the only thing which holds Vista 64-bit back for me.

The fact that the majority of developers cater for the far larger 32-bit market and haven't even begin to consider the 64-bit platform as far as Windows goes. Mac OS X is of course 64-bit, and native 64-bit apps are coming from the likes of Adobe for the platform. When will they start producing for the windows 64-bit? Vista is actually good to use as a 64-bit platform, because of a lot of software will run with it now. I'm so glad Apple sorted Itunes out for the OS, my Ipod now be synced! Woo, orgasm!

Except for the slow file copying, the fact that Windows Explorer slows down with Aero, some strange happenings with the built-in FTP functionality (oh yes I use that because it streamlines the access to my webspace. I'm not messing around with FTP Clients to find which is the right one), and the rather sluggish feel to any of my requests.

DirectX10 has been a bit of a farce so far, hasn't it? Has anyone truley noticed an truly awe-insiring difference in games using using DirectX10 instead of 9.0C? A lot of the effects in Crysis have been done on XP (that article of Very High on the cheap springs to mind) and frankly Bioshock looks just as damned good in either. Speed reduction used to be really significant however NVIDIA (don't truly know about AMD in truth) should be credited by the strides they have taken to get speed up in Vista so there is only 5 or 6 fps difference in some areas no matter what standard is being used.

And it turns out when NVIDIA got their own way on having one part of DirectX10 left out of being mandatory, there is actually nothing to stop MS from introducing it to XP. That's a nast thought? What's the point then of going to Vista?

And shockingly, here's something you wouldn't expect: Guitar Hero 3 for me was far better in Vista, methinks to due the memory management emplyed by the OS over XP. It stuttered in XP to point of seriously putting me off. Mind you that was something I was going to an Audio Email about for another topic of discussion so i will save that moan for later!!

UAC will only serve to piss people off. Even more so for people who work in support (trust me, you need to turn it off on Server 2008 or it will annoy you too!) as they shouldn't need the "babysitting" option turned on. So that was turned off. Mind you I pity the poor bastards at Microsoft, they have to have it left on otherwise it is a sacking offence according to one of the MS engineers we have on site! I know why they would have introduced it, to stop normal people from doing naughty with some of the settings, but it pops up too many times, because it seems doing almost anything in Vista is considered an "admin" task. Are you sure you want to change the time? Are you sure you want to click on the start menu? Are you sure you need the toilet?

Almost as bad as the Microsoft Paper Clip from Office.

I have had SP1 installed for Vista 32-bit and it did sort one or two problems. That's it. The slow file copying has stopped some of the time, then was a problem other times. Sometimes, Explorer did respond more timely and it did bring a smile back to my face for a time. But then again, Vista should have been like that since Day 1.

After the issues people have had, once you've had an impression of using something and it's a negative experience, that sticks with you no matter what, and Microsoft pretty much have lost the PR battle. You just hope that extra bits are sorted out in the subseqent service packs.

I have had XP on my 4 year old laptop from Dell, and it's still going strong, doing what I need in a slightly speedy manner, which includes running two VM Windows 2003 servers in their own domain, while playing with php files in Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.

Vista to me, at the moment, the only true thing it has going for it, is gaming. DirectX 10 speed is improving to the point where you can't tell the difference on high end equipment. And as time goes on and refinements are made, more than likely continuing into the next Windows OS and we will see some real intelligent use of the API.

XP has the lower specs required for it to run but that's to be expected as it has been on the market for ages. Of course it's going to be refined, faster, does what people want. Products have been created with XP in mind.

Vista is still far too new and in all honesty, it should still be in testing with more features to really sell it to the consumer. Even if they took longer still to produce it, they would have ended up with a better product which the market would have been ready for, and it would have been embraced by the public better than it has been. Perhaps that is the reason why Windows 7 is heading for retail it seems, though I don't know how, for next year, because it was too soon for Vista to appear. It only serves to tell people: leave vista alone, what's the point, there's another one coming around the corner!!

To move off XP, I hope the next Windows OS would be 64-bit only, if only get Adobe off their arses and produce a 64-bit version of the Flash Player for IE 64-bit! To me the arguement is simple:

32-bit = Stick with XP for now.
64-bit = Go for Vista, it's far better than XP64. Just a shame about the playback codecs otherwise It would be used on my system full time. I actually do like Vista 64-bit.

There, I'm done!

What kind of gains have been made in NVIDIA driver performance on 64-bit Vista?

I've got a Core 2 Duo machine and an 8800GT, and I'd have no problem bumping my RAM from 2GB to 4GB for Vista.

Bioshock for me is now perfectly playable regardless of what platform at Maximum settings (1900x1200 res too) with only one or two bits of stuttering. That's one example I can think of right now.

You don't have to have 4GB for Vista, it's just if you fully plan on going 64-bit and want all the memory usable. Otherwise what you have should be good enough, I would have thought.

RAM is cheap enough, I would have 4GB already if 32-bit XP supported it. I'm also a framerate fanatic and hate anything dipping below 60fps (but lack the money to roll with dual 8800 Ultras or anything like that).

These benchmarks help ease my concerns, though, even though they're just a-guy-on-a-forum benchmarks.

How to get to your network properties in one click.

I still see Vista more or less as I viewed it a year ago. It's a significant (and mostly needed) changeover in how Windows operates under the hood, but it's not an immediately compelling or needed upgrade for end users. On the whole, I'm pretty happy with Vista, but then I didn't have to pay for it. If I had dropped a few hundred bucks on the Ultimate edition I'd almost certainly be more underwhelmed with the end user experience.

Personally, I like the little things. I like file explorer navigation (especially breadcrumbing), I like the Aero UI and the search field built into the Start Menu. I like the built in parental controls, since my kids will be coming of PC-using age in a couple year. I like that it has a passable photo browser built in (Photo Gallery) and I think, even if UAC is annoying, the fundamental changes to user account types and how they operate is a much needed improvement. I like the implementation of a Public users folder for shared media.

I did run into a lot of issues with Vista in the first few months I had it last year, but those have pretty much all gone by the wayside as driver support has improved and some patches addressed other problems. Right now, even pre-SP1, my machine has been crash free for months and the games I've thrown at it since the summer have all worked without a compatibility-related fail. The only real headache has been the Sleep mode, which no longer seems to actually put my system in sleep mode (unless I do it from the login menu). I read an Ed Bott blog post at ZDNet (too lazy to link it) today that indicated a significant chunk of the SP1 fixes are devoted to power and sleep mode issues, so I'm hoping those will go away once I apply it.

So, for me, it's fine. For most people, though? I certainly wouldn't avoid it when getting a new desktop system. I think the whole XP downgrade thing for new desktops sounds a bit silly unless an individual has a specific reason for doing so. (It sounds like it depends on the system where laptops are concerned.) But, at the same time, I wouldn't recommend someone go out to the store and buy a retail copy off the shelf. Unless there's a particular Vista-specific feature or spec you absolutely need to have, I just don't think there's a compelling reason to move off of XP right now. But then I think about operating systems like I think about annual sports games: For the most part, you're just fine skipping over every other release.
---Todd

Has anyone seen any 64bit Vista Home Premium deals? Cheapest I have seen is $111 OEM system builder's version on Newegg.com

I am also dual booting xp and Vista. I never go into Vista anymore. I tried playing Crysis in it and my sounds sucks really bad. I get this very choppy sound all the time. It was the same thing with bioshock.

When playing source engine games I had 80 fps less than I would in xp which took it below 30 at times. My overall experience with it was not good.

It is great for web browsing and such but (for me) it sucks for games. Even with my DX10 card. The driver support is very very poor especially on the sound card side.

TempestBlayze wrote:

I am also dual booting xp and Vista. I never go into Vista anymore. I tried playing Crysis in it and my sounds sucks really bad. I get this very choppy sound all the time. It was the same thing with bioshock.

I had this problem until the last Vista Nvidia beta update and it was fixed.

I was looking forward to putting steam on my new lappy... Are the issues really that serious with Vista?

None now. Like Tempest mentioned there was some serious sound problems, but that last update fixed it for me. As for the FPS i've not had a problem, but i came from an old p4 system.

I've had no problems with FPS in the games I've played (including a max'd out Bioshock, but not Crysis). I had problems with Steam in the months following release, but since I reinstalled it a few months ago it's worked just fine.
---Todd

I installed those beta drivers and still ahd the same problem. I think it is only with audigys, sound blasters, and Xifi sound cards.

You're laptop will probably be fine.

samfisher wrote:

The X-FI drivers do need more attention and the ALchemy application which re-routes the software sound calls to the HW accelerated OpenAL system works half the time and other times I have noticed instablity with certain games such as Bioshock, which crashes when the EAX is enabled, only for it to work fine after it is once again disabled.

For Bioshock you shouldn't be using ALchemy to emulate EAX! See the note under Audio Options in this TweakGuides guide.

I had some X-Fi oddities as well when I installed the drivers that came on the CD. That's until I found out those are actually XP drivers and that Creative has since released proper Vista drivers. Updating all of my X-Fi components (drivers, volume panel, etc) to those cured my issues, but I know lots of other people aren't as lucky. Creative has since released another driver update, but I'm too scared to tinker with something that's working 100%. Which says a great deal about Creative and Vista, I guess. :confused:

edit: eh, nevermind, beating a dead horse vista sux linux sux ur mom does too omg wtf go away

The only real issue I was having with Vista was sound related, in the end I ditched my audigy card and went with the onboard sound, and everythings fine now. Creative have really dropped the ball on Vista support.

Steam works fine, as do all the games I've tried so far, even some older titles like Sacrifice. No worries at all. Put me in the camp that actually likes it. Runs well, no crashing, no dramas.

Yeah, it's a real shame but Creative cards under Vista are barely worth the headache right now. I still cannot do any recording using my X-Fi XtremeGamer -- it just sounds like static. The first couple of times I tried to play Shadowrun online, I got yelled at a lot. If you want X-Fi functionality and have the bucks, get an Auzentech Prelude 7.1. Auzentech is supporting the drivers for that and it apparently works way better under Vista. But when even bad-ass system builders like Falcon Northwest are defaulting to on-board audio, it really makes you aware of how irrelevant Creative cards are becoming.

Mex wrote:

edit: eh, nevermind, beating a dead horse vista sux linux sux ur mom does too omg wtf go away

QFA (awesome)

But when even bad-ass system builders like Falcon Northwest are defaulting to on-board audio, it really makes you aware of how irrelevant Creative cards are becoming.

The last Steam hardware survey showed something like 2% uptake on X-Fi. Creative, IMO, is in a death spiral; they don't sell cards because they don't make good drivers anymore, and they don't make good drivers because they don't sell enough cards and, thus, can't (or won't) pay enough to get them done well.

I won't miss them. Any company that charges me $20 for a driver CD that I should be able to download for free deserves to die. In fire. With lots of screaming.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled Vista discussion.

Malor wrote:

I won't miss them. Any company that charges me $20 for a driver CD that I should be able to download for free deserves to die. In fire. With lots of screaming.

But you gotta' admit, as slimy as that is, it's pretty Creative of them! ... Am I I right folks? ... Thank you, g'night!

Multi-core processors are the final nail in the sound card coffin, for widespread general use at least.

It's a trend we see over in consoles. Both the Xbox and PS2 had some dedicated, discrete audio processing hardware (beyond just signal conversion). Neither the Xbox 360 nor the PS3 do. The 360 has a 3-core general purpose CPU, while the PS3's Cell processor has six DSP-like "SPEs", one or more of which can be thrown at doing sound processing on the CPU itself.

On the PC, we've already got software sound processing being a minor, completely acceptable hit in performance. Once multi-core is the norm, and you can throw increased audio processing on a secondary core and not worry about it interfering with performance-sensitive tasks on a different core, who needs DSP hardware anymore, at least on the general consumer side?

Well one could always foresee uses for PROPER sound processing. The kind of software processing we have in games now is pretty rudimentary.

The first time I heard EAX 4.0 in Splinter Cell in my 4-speaker setup ... it was eons beyond software sound processing... not just because I had more than 2 speakers, but because of how the sounds changed, how their behavior was simulated relative to the environment and to my position.

I'd like to see all the features that EAX boasted, actually processed in hardware with no performance hit (EAX itself certainly didnt do that). That would of course call for more powerful and thorough DSPs.

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