Windows Switching to Vista... My big decision

Hi Everyone,

Lately, I've been battling the idea to make the switch to Vista to better serve my gaming needs, but I can't really make up my mind. This past summer I made the jump (back) to Vista only to be completely turned off by it's bugginess, lacking of driver support, and awful gaming performance. Now with my newly upgraded system, I'm sitting here wondering if I should invest many hours of my time trying out Vista again. With November being the gaming dream month, I don't really want to be missing out on the advantages of the new DX10 titles. I'm not honestly all that worried about gaming performance, I can easily spare a few frames here and there, it's just the general crappyness of the Vista that I experienced is what is turning me off.

Has anything really changed over the summer and fall months? I've heard about all the performance/compatibility packs that MS has been releasing, as well as the SP1 beta, but have all these minor updates really done anything substantial enough to give it another chance?

Enlighten me,
-Evan

 

Vista works fine now that driver support has improved (thanks to 3rd parties getting decent drivers out). Get the 64-bit verson of Vista and game away.

 

I've been using Vista for about 2 months I'd say maybe less, and I tell you its perfectly fine never had a BSOD, or real problem, if there has been a problem its nothing to do with Vista or Microsoft It's to do with Creative and Lexmark's crappy driver support for newish devices, other than that i would recommend it to anyone in my family!

 

I've been thinking about doing the same for the past few weeks now but to be honest my systems running fine with XP and with my system not being the best am slightly dubious if it will perform as well as XP SP2 that's on it at the mo.

 

64 Bit issue.

Thats the other thing, the whole 64bit situation. Is there really any big performance increase running x64 vs. x86 apps? I've heard conflicting views about Vista64, and the fact that not many popular (see gaming) apps have x64 versions. I know FarCry offers x64 support, but I could honestly care less.

 

Read This It's a article Brett Thomas on 64-bit computing should give the basic understanding's and enlighten you alot.

 

were you using a proper vesrion this summer or an old beta version?

Theres nothing wrong with vista any more, most people who complain about it. Havn't used it in a while or without the updates.

I'd say my vista x64 performs better that xp.
The only problem I can remember was when 4od came out. There wasn't a vista version, but now there is.

 

coudnt have said it better, just one thing to add, for the ones concerned about vista babysitting you or the ui being bloatware.... you can configure vista too

 

I have, in the contrary, had five BSODs in the last week. But, overall it is fine really. Quite fast, doesn't crash, and gaming performance is not too bad. But, it still needs a lot of work.

 

The version I was having trouble with this summer was a retail version of 32bit Ultimate. One of my biggest gripes was the lack of 3rd-party driver support and compatibility. It's good to hear MS and hardware makers have really started to ramp up Vista driver production/adaptation, I might just have to spend some of this weekend getting my system DX10 ready... Followed by 40h straight of the Crysis demo...

Best,
-Evan

 

I built a new machine last month and it took me an hour to install Vista, and it just worked pretty much out of the box. I only had go and get the latest nvidia drivers, everything else was detected automatically. It feels fast using it day to day and feels stable and I also have no complaints about the gaming performance. In my opinion if you have a decent machine with modern hardware vista works great.

 

I have been using Vista since Beta. The initial release version did not run that much software without issues and drivers were hard to get. Now is a different. Most people will have upgraded hardware anyway, hence Vista drivers are there. I have 3 machine running Vista (including work PC) and have no problems. However I would say some old legacy games may have a few problems. One game I love Civ 4 seams to have problems, but dual boot XP just in case. Vista all the way, I love it.

 

I'm quite the MS fanboy (bet you'd never guess) and I've been using Vista for over a year now and I've had little or no problems with it, the OS rocks. The only forseeable problems would be driver problems with companies that just don't like you (creative) and some decade old programs don't work sometimes (Red Alert 2 is a pain but will eventually work).

 

I have been using Vista since November last year (business release) and only ever had issues with a couple of 64 bit apps. Other than this Vista seems very stable and quicker than XP by a long shot.

 

BTW. All my copies of Vista are 32 bit, as I see no benefit for x64 expect when using 4GB of ram. Had problems with x64 when installing a few months ago with drivers, when back to 32 bit and drivers worked.

 

Vista been working fine for me since installation in March.

 

Would still remain with XP. Vista is not so much different from XP other than some additional security features added in and you would still require fairly competent hardware to run Vista (depending which version u're intending to use).

Vista has not been able to properly run stably on some of my CAD softwares in compatibility mode. I'm also not denying the fact that Vista will be here to stay for the next few years till about 2010 when Windows7 is released and would probably require some high-end hardware specs again.

 

I prefer XP as it's what most of my machines run, it has less HD content restrictions, more proven with wide range of software.

But, I do think Vista is a safe viable OS now, with SP1 just around teh corner . . . . if you don't have much legacy stuff, I would go Vista, but maybe wait for SP1.

 

Vista is the way forward.

 

My main gripe with 2000/XP, as a layman, is that ctrl-alt-del doesn't work the way it's supposed to. In Win9x it was an overpowered backdoor utility that overrode everything and could terminate every process. Apparently, this was too risky for every consumer and their grandparents, so in XP it seems to be on the same level as any other program - that is, in serious crashes, the task manager crashes too. It also gets stuck behind a lot of full-screen apps, so you can't terminate stuff as and when you please.

So, question: does vista resolve this? What's the equivalent task manager like in it?