To Vista or Not to Vista

[David A Sell]

Hi guys -

 

I had debated for a while about putting Vista on my machine, had heard such terrible things about it, little driver support, XP is rock solid, ect. I bit the bullet and installed and am here to report WOW. just hoping some people who may be on the fence go ahead and take the plunge. I am AMAZED at the improvement I get in BS, its almost like a differnt game. I went from 12-15 fps over a busy airbase to 35-40 ! and over open country skys the limit. I think vista is a must have to take advantage of this game. :thumbup:

[EtherealN]

Yup.

 

The bullshit about how terrible Vista is is just that, bullshit. There are some rough edges to it but overall it is quite clearly superior.

[AlphaInfinity]

Yup.

 

The bullshit about how terrible Vista is is just that, bullshit. There are some rough edges to it but overall it is quite clearly superior.

 

 

Agreed. And hopefully windows 7 will be even better. For those that are thinking about upgrading, make sure to disable UAC and I disabled AERO.

Edited March 24, 2009 by AlphaInfinity

[TangoRomeo]

Don't do it - it's not worth it updating Win XP atm. If you plan to upgrade, wait for Win 7.

[David A Sell]

I dont really agree tangoRomeo , I got vista basic 64 for under $100.00, and although i dont know the release date for 7 I think its near then end of this year, i hate to deprive myself of the extra power vista offers at that price. I guess it depends on your machine, in my case I had 5 gigs of ram and 3 cores that were not being utilized at all so It was a no brainer. Also I think I will wait for at least a few months after 7 release to let them get the kinks worked out, seems like new OS's have a bit of hiccups at the beginning. Just depends on what your willing to spend... Side note, anyone know what the price of 64bit 7 is expected to be?

[connos]

To Vista 64bit and 4GB ram and you will never want to go back to XP.

[GregP]

I think the massive framerate increases some people see in going from XP to Vista (Munny being a case in point) have to do with XP by default not taking advantage of multiple cores while Vista does. In my own experience, using DCSmax under both XP and Vista - and thus presumably roughly equal utilization of multiple cores between the two OSes - my framerates go from 45-50 in Instant Action in XP to 51-57 under Vista.

[TangoRomeo]

Lets face it, most people that got Vista installed (me included) will probably switch to 7 when it hits the market, therefore buying Vista is not reasonable imho. Performance-wise, 7, in it's current state, is already ahead of Vista, while most applications are still performing best on XP systems, mind you without any compatibility issues Vista still has.

 

Here's a nice article putting winXP/Vista/7 multicore performance against each other.

http://www.infoworld.com/article/09/01/22/03TC-windows-multicore_1.html

[WynnTTr]

Hi guys -

 

I had debated for a while about putting Vista on my machine, had heard such terrible things about it, little driver support, XP is rock solid, ect. I bit the bullet and installed and am here to report WOW. just hoping some people who may be on the fence go ahead and take the plunge. I am AMAZED at the improvement I get in BS, its almost like a differnt game. I went from 12-15 fps over a busy airbase to 35-40 ! and over open country skys the limit. I think vista is a must have to take advantage of this game. :thumbup:

Vista in its current iteration (w/ sp1) is pretty good with a decent machine such as yours.

However I wouldn't go as far out to say that it's fantastic - I still remember the early days. And if I still had a 2Gb/dual core machine, I'd stick with XP.

[oritpro]

To Vista 64bit and 4GB ram and you will never want to go back to XP.

 

Ditto, I am running Vista 64 on my gaming rig and am pretty happy with it.

 

The latest build of Windows 7 is already leaps and bounds beyond Vista and XP in terms of performance. I haven't gamed with it yet, but it is quite snappy. If MS maintains focus and continues to listen to their customers the final product will be exceptional.

Edited March 24, 2009 by oritpro

[WynnTTr]

Ditto, I am running Vista 64 on my gaming rig and am pretty happy with it.

 

The latest build of Windows 7 is already leaps and bounds beyond Vista and XP in terms of performance. I haven't gamed with it yet, but it is quite snappy. If MS maintains focus and continues to listen to their customers the final product will be exceptional.

Agreed. Windows 7 is what Vista should have been from day 1. I have it running on an older laptop and it runs faster than XP on it. I'll be upgrading to the retail release of W7 for my main rig.... unless M$ stuffs things up majorly.

You never know with them.

[Slick Twitchy]

Yup, I jumped from XP to the Win 7 beta, and it was CRAZY better. I'd guesstimate 20 fps better. From chop to butter. Multiple CPUS etc.

 

'Course I did this after I froze my system trying to overclock it for Black Shark.

[CyBerkut]

Does Windows 7 give us back one of the key advantages that was lost in Vista... Horizontal and Vertical spanning capability for use with multiple monitors? XP can do it, and Vista did away with it. Can Win 7 do it?

[viper3two]

just my two cents. been running xp pro for a long time and feared switching to vista for everybody telling me that nothing would run, i couldn't find drivers, it is glitchy, ect....I have about 1 TB of games installed and would not do it because I "thought" it would break everything. Boy was I wrong....

Well, I just built a new box (still in process tweaking) and couldn't be happier with vista 64. MASSIVE frame rate improvements and generally, it runs alot smoother. I had no, absolutely no issues installing stuff except for that stupid game explorer thingy, but I just made my own start menu folder for my games and copied the shortcuts there. Other than that, no issues with drivers, hardware or any of my sims and games. Not even the old stuff!!I won't go back to xp now lol.

[PoleCat]

No horizontal or vertical span in Windows 7 beta. Not sure if planned for release but I doubt it. Windows 7 looks and feels like Vista SP2 to me. Needed a re-brand anyway as the Vista name is fairly muddied by a premature release and horrible 3rd party driver support. By SP1 it was looking much better but first impressions really matter in an OS.

 

Out

[CyBerkut]

Thanks, PoleCat.

[lion737]

I have Vista64 and XP on my system. With the affinity tool Vista gives you about 15% better frame rate over XP. (without it is 20% slower)

I don´t need that. 25-30 fps is good enough for me.

 

I boot XP most of the time. I hate to wait after every mouseclick. XP is reacting instantly. Vista is first checking wether everything is ´save´. And then it asks you, wether you really did click the mouse, then you click to continue. You got to be patient ;)

[Cap_Z]

 

I boot XP most of the time. I hate to wait after every mouseclick. XP is reacting instantly. Vista is first checking wether everything is ´save´. And then it asks you, wether you really did click the mouse, then you click to continue. You got to be patient ;)

 

Actually I don't think the UI is slower because of UAC, but mostly because the Aero GUI has a lot of rendering overhead. I have always run XP in Classic Theme because the XP theme was so childish and butt ugly. The Vista Aero theme is beautiful but takes a bit of time to render.

 

If I turn Aero off and choose Classic Theme, Vista responds as quickly as XP running the Classic Theme. But, I keep the Aero on because I like the look and the delay is minimal with my Q6600 @3.1GHz. Aero seems to have no effect on games running full screen as it is essentially shut off when the desktop is not displayed. I get the same FPS in full screen games with Aero on or off.

[EtherealN]

Lion, you do know you can disable that, right? :P

 

And the reason why they implemented the system is, from what I have understood (I'm no software engineer so I can be wrong), is that it is one of the steps to prevent rights escalation. That is basically where a program inherits the same rights as the user that starts it, and if the program then starts a third program that third one also has the same rights as you.

 

So, in XP, when you get a nice trojan it'll basically have free reins to do whatever it wants. When an infected program attempts to start a payload (f.ex to make your computer part of a zombie network), it will have the rights to do so and it happens. With Vista, that new program will not have the rights, wherefore it needs explicit authorization. This means less risk by design of your machine being successfully usurped. Of course, one should still have proper antivirus and so on and for extra points a hardware firewall running BSD, to ensure multiple lines of defence.

 

The one thing that I really hate about Vista is one that is common to all windows - it's impossible to get a verbose bootup sequence. I want to know what it's doing when I start it up, not look at some fancy graphic. :(

 

Finally, if you have to wait for every mouseclick in Vista then there is something seriously wonky happening in your computer. My Vista systems have always been smooth runners unless I (for battery time reasons) get a little too zealous in underclocking the Vista laptop or have 100% RAM load. :P

 

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Cap_Z, that reminds me, yeah, I run the gaming rig without Aero. The laptop I run with Aero though and there's usually no issues. I really really need to do a proper cleanup of the hard drive, though. :P