Wish me luck!

Post by **Neil** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 12:30 pm

Hi Guys!

Due to a system bugger-up, I have to reinstall my operating system. Maybe it's the lack of sleep talking, or the glow around my retail copy of Vista Home Premium sitting on my shelf, but I'm taking the plunge, Baby!

Wish me luck!

Regards,
Neil

Post by **cybereality** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 12:38 pm

Cool, good luck man! Vista isn't really all that bad, however there are some bugs that still need ironing out.

Post by **LukePC1** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 4:20 pm

Neil wrote: Wish me luck!

Ok I wish me luck...
I want you to make this/those next review(s)... There is something cooking, but we need to know, what and how it will compare to other stuff.

You are going to become a PC builder in a while

Post by **Neil** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 4:20 pm

The pain! The pain!

I'm bringing my computer up to speed, and this install has taken longer than expected. However, it's working!

Regards,
Neil

Post by **Neil** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 5:02 pm

Hours later, I'm finally installing my first game.

Shame about Creative XFI users. I have a 6.1 speaker surround sound system, and their Vista drivers only support 5.1 and 7.1. Also, you need to use their "Alchemy Project" to get EAX support in games to get around Microsoft's architecture change.

Neil

Post by **Neil** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 8:02 pm

Ok, so far I'm not a happy camper. The performance loss is really significant. Any tweaking recommendations?

Regards,
Neil

Post by **cybereality** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 9:01 pm

Neil wrote:Ok, so far I'm not a happy camper. The performance loss is really significant. Any tweaking recommendations?

When loading Vista fresh it needs to do all this pre-caching/indexing in order to work properly (especially while you are setting it up, installing a lot of stuff, etc.). It has to do with how Vista manages memory. You can google "superfetch" for more info. After you get it all set up it will get faster. I think it takes a few weeks to stabilize.

Post by **Okta** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 11:39 pm

c:\format c:

Post by **Neil** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 12:03 am

Maybe it's not so bad. I discovered that my RAM timings were off and I wasn't in dual channel mode - but this doesn't make THAT big a difference in real world performance tests.

However, I got to thinking, I should get a third hard drive and have a special XP setup for testing on the same machine. Man...I'm not looking forward to my next hydro bill.

Regards,
Neil

Post by **Tril** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 12:42 am

Or you could have made more partitions on your current drive. I separated a 750 GB HDD in three partitions and I installed three OS : XP, Vista 32 bit and Vista 64 bit. I choose which of the three to load at boot, usually Vista 64. The other two are for fallback purposes when something does not work in Vista 64 bit (like the stereo driver of the VR920).

Post by **cybereality** » Wed Jun 18, 2008 5:17 pm

Neil wrote:Any tweaking recommendations?

Go here and download this guide. It has a pretty comprehensive list of tweaks:
http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html

Post by **daws** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 3:03 am

Well, it's about some month that I'm using Vista, on my laptop. Well after initial disappointment on low 3dmark score, I'm going to change my mind. Basically for my experience, game performance are very linked to video driver. Vista in particular is growing performance on every driver release, I'm speaking about nvidia. Also after many test by myself I found that real game performance dosen't match so close what 3dmark says. I've done many test using fraps to check in game fps, and found many times very close score, if not equal, compared to XP SP3 32 bit with the same driver version. In some case I've also found better performace in Vista than XP, like in SuperBike 2001 ! (a very old game) probaly due to a better memory management.
Vista still has some minor bugs, but after some time you'll fell it more "solid" and "reliable", expecially after tons of programs install, things that can make XP really slow.

Anyway you need a decent hardware. Expecially 2 GB of ram are ok, more are very better!

Post by **cybereality** » Thu Jun 19, 2008 12:37 pm

daws wrote:Vista still has some minor bugs, but after some time you'll fell it more "solid" and "reliable", expecially after tons of programs install, things that can make XP really slow.

The one thing I like about Vista is that CTRL-ALT-DEL works pretty much every time unlike XP where sometime it just wouldn't give you control back. Also, Vista seems to get faster with time, whereas XP just gets continuously slower.

Post by **Neil** » Fri Jun 20, 2008 8:48 am

I just wanted to add that gaming performance in Vista and XP is definitely comparable. I have XP and Vista installed on separate hard drives, and the performance margins between the two operating systems is very negligible.

Regards,
Neil

Wish me luck!

Wish me luck!

Re: Wish me luck!