Vista Ultimate loves my 4400+

COntrary to a lot of reviews, Vista is a great OS and I don't think I could ever go back to XP. You just have to experience it.

I just played DOom3 and I can now use my wireless Logitech KB.

UAC is not a pain but clean installs are not a lot of fun.

WHile you are trying to cruise around after install - which is a million times better than XP - Vista is out searching for updates and such and you may have to reboot before you know it.

It seems snappier though and the UI animations are stellar.

I give Vista a Thumbs up.

D3 which is said to have graphical issues played smooter than ever (whether or not the fps is exactly the same)

I just installed nVidia's Vista driver and was off to the races.

There are a few things I am not liking. Well, actually one big thing. In XP my TaskBar extended across both monitors, in Vista it doesn't. It's a pain because when I'm in the right hand monitor I have to drag all the way to the left hand monitor. Also, D3 doesn't keep the second montior alive when playing.

I did a clean install this time but now that I know it will work well, I may upgrade my C drive this weekend. For my next upgrade I will be going to X64.

I'll get it when I can get it free through the CS department from school.

SP1 is due out this year. MS has already released app compat patches. Believe me, you will love it. MS is offering a deals where you can get Ultimate and Home Premium for $300 if you buy retail. You can even get X86 and X64 on the CD.

Does using RC2 count as having it? Anyways, I deleted that a couple months back and will upgrade to the final version when it comes out at my campus store (hopefully they'll have Ultimate for around $30), which should be in April. I was pretty impressed with the RC and by April driver support should be decent, so I'm making the jump.

MS love all you early adopters. Right now they are saying chaaaching. Stocks go up and shareholders are happy.

All kidding aside, I'll wait for the first truly revelolutionary DX10 game before jumping to Vista (by that time there should be a choice in DX10 cards), it'll probably be Crysis. The thing about all the incredible Crysis screenshots is that they have all been on DX9.0c, so I don't know how much better it'll be on DX10.

Who says I bought Vista? (^_^) And its still legal man.

You could wait for an OEM version. Hopefully they'll be around when I decide to upgrade.

I can't see myself splurging on the Ultimate or the Ultimate Extra version so for the moment it's a toss up between Home Premium and Business. Maybe one of each for my HTPC and primary rig.

I am still very confused !

Now the reason why I posted this useless statement -at least it is for me - is that I am hoping someone will help me to decide !

I am not impressed by the visuals in Vista .. I saw a video for Mac OSX -or whatever - and this is what I call a 3D desktop .

to me vista looks like a good XP theme .. no more .. and I am still worring about the performance under my 1.0GB of RAM system .. especially gaming performance .

If gaming is your top priority then skip Windows Vista for the moment since the performance will be a little worse than on Windows XP.

The only reason you should upgrade to Windows Vista in the short term is if you have a DX10 card and you absolutely want to see what DX10 graphics have to offer.

Other than that sit on the sideline and save your money.

Old news.... And still the same EULA's. Try an upgrade of your MB with that oem key. WGA will keep the virii out... Right.... YOU are the virus that M$ wants to keep out.

Not exactly true since OEM versions of Windows XP can be purchased seperately at the moment. Of course, that could be different with Windows Vista.

quote: "Vista Ultimate loves my 4400+"

Do you think she can love my c2d E6400 at the same time? I hope you don't mind a trio?!

I changed "it" to "she". seemed more appropriate.

Ah! voted for option "When reviewers say compatibilty is good enough". If by some miracle a hacked version of DX10 is ported to XP, I see no reason to make a switch. Only reason that I would switch after that would be that all applications+games are 64bit natively written with multicore and complete driver support. And that would take some time....

I'll run Vista in about a years time.Well after the sp1 comes out.Only then will I consider it adequit enough.

Dahak

AMD X2-4400+@2.6 S-939
EVGA NF4 SLI MB
2X EVGA 7800GT IN SLI
2X1GIG DDR IN DC MODE (soon 2b crucial balistix ddr500)
WD300GIG HD
EXTREME 19IN.MONITOR 1280X1024
THERMALTAKE TOUGHPOWER 850WATT PSU
COOLERMASTER MINI R120

Vista is worthless besides DX10. Sure. It looks more polished. It also sucks in many MANY ways.
Im sticking with XP and after that Im going Linux.

If your system is simple and generic and don't have any grand expectations Vista will seem like a wonderful upgrade..., otherwise its a big steaming piece of sh**. It did nothing amazing for my top of the line 680iSLI, 8800GTX, water cooled C2D machine but slow it down.

Looked like an overdone version of OSX. It decided all my firewall, burning, disk management system monitoring tools, burning tools were no good along with 80 percent of my drivers. Even with Vista drivers half my functions were gone and the built in firewall and disk management tools where so noobed out it was ridiculous.

It was a waste of time. Fortunately I ghosted my system before doing the upgrade. So I got tired of the Vista F'up mess and reghosted back. Microsoft has decided that people want to be treated like mac users who don't ever want to do any upgrades and treat thier computers like an appliance.

It was the people that tinker and upgrade and write their own stuff that made the PC platform as successful as it is today. Why make it a stagnant locked up box built for idiots I don't understand...., I'm ranting now.

Well to be honest, most people have been complaining about the "plainness" of the Windows OS and its "user-unfriendliness". The majority complained, and MS acted. They dumbed it down and candied it up. But if you look at the actual kernel, its better written than XP and is a vast improvement stability wise over XP. The problems with crashing usually stem from people using bad drivers or incompatible driver and software with Vista.

Vista's running great on my gaming rig (see sig).

I have the full retail version of ultimate and have the 64 installed. I found 1 compatability issue with a dvd ripping program, but it's probably because it is 3 years old and crappy anyway, all my games and all my other programs work fine - including games like WOW, SWG, C&C etc and all my not-so-legal apps like dvd rippers (excluding the old one i mentioned above).

Vista is a little snappied UI wise, and i do find it more responsive, as winows do open instantly.

Anyway, i upgraded to vista now as i can have it all set up before the dx 10 games hit, so when they do hit i'll be playing while people sort out any issues they get installing vista (no upgrades from 32 bit windows to 64 bit vista for example)...took me a couple days to install all my 800gb of games and software again :|

I did the same thing. I would say 50% of the applications I use on a daily basis either wouldn't install (normally or with any type of compatibility mode) or exhibited terrible behavior afterwards. One install got hung when trying to do a regedit.

Thank goodness process explorer still works though. Eventually I took Vista off and put 2003 back on (it's my mini workstation). I'll let other people get all the bugs worked out. *Eagerly awaits SP1*.

Number one gripe - having to right click CMD to have an "Administrator Command Prompt". I'm logged on as an admin, DEFAULT RUN ALL PROGRAMS AS AN ADMIN!

I voted the 'When hell freezes, because a resource consuming OS just does not make sense for 3D modeling and photo editing.

By your logic, we should be 3D modeling and photo editing on Windows 98 or 2000, as they use significantly less resources than XP. Yes, Vista uses more resources, because its a NEW OS. You don't really expect it to use less resources, do you? Wait for decent drivers and software optimization, and Vista will outperform XP.

I will move to Vista for my next build. That might be March or April 2008 after tax refund season. (This year's tax refund pays for a wedding and honeymoon trip! So no new computer this year!)

My socket 939 X2 3800+ will last me another year or so just fine for what I'm using it for. Mostly some Photoshop work, a few older games and I learned to be happy with Oblivion at medium settings (my 7600 GT could do better but I prefer the faster framerates over eye candy).

By this time next year AMD should have their new architecture out, Intel may have Penryn available, DX10 cards should be lower priced, DDR2 prices should be lower for fast memory (let's hope), and Vista SP1 should be available.
At that point it would make sense to me. Not before.

I totally disagree.

Being a developer, I know that it is possible to add new features and looks and still keep resource usage at the same levels as before. How?

ALGORITHM OPTIMIZATION

If the MS developers focus on really optimizing their algorithms, in the development process, maybe windows could be much, MUCH more efficient. There are several ways of doing the same thing, and, usually, the easiest way is seldom the most efficient. Since the MS developers are on a tight schedule, I suppose they invest very little time on writing optimized code.

Examples (and proof) of this are the bugs that are frequent on commercial apps and the need for frequent patches.

I wonder if it would be like this if the developers spent a little more time debugging and optimizing their code.


So, a new OS doesn't necessarily have to be more "resource-hungry". If the code is better written than before, it is possible to have more features and not use more resources.

When I tried Vista Business, the machine took 3% of a P4 2.8 HT CPU and 400 Mb of RAM just sitting there. No programs, no nothing. That is simply unacceptable.

Not a flame just a rewording....
Instead why not just add: "I love my 80386 with windows 3.1 thank you" hahaha

~Cheers

I totally disagree.

Being a developer, I know that it is possible to add new features and looks and still keep resource usage at the same levels as before. How?

ALGORITHM OPTIMIZATION

If the MS developers focus on really optimizing their algorithms, in the development process, maybe windows could be much, MUCH more efficient. There are several ways of doing the same thing, and, usually, the easiest way is seldom the most efficient. Since the MS developers are on a tight schedule, I suppose they invest very little time on writing optimized code.

Examples (and proof) of this are the bugs that are frequent on commercial apps and the need for frequent patches.

I wonder if it would be like this if the developers spent a little more time debugging and optimizing their code.


So, a new OS doesn't necessarily have to be more "resource-hungry". If the code is better written than before, it is possible to have more features and not use more resources.

When I tried Vista Business, the machine took 3% of a P4 2.8 HT CPU and 400 Mb of RAM just sitting there. No programs, no nothing. That is simply unacceptable.

I think you're oversimplifying Windows. There is a new speech engine, more in-depth Backup, DRM( ), BitLocker, more dianostic tools, etc.

I went to Task Mgr and only Task Mgr was showing CPU usage. I don't mind if it uses more RAM if my apps get enough.

My CPU is loving it.

I totally disagree.

Being a developer, I know that it is possible to add new features and looks and still keep resource usage at the same levels as before. How?

ALGORITHM OPTIMIZATION

If the MS developers focus on really optimizing their algorithms, in the development process, maybe windows could be much, MUCH more efficient. There are several ways of doing the same thing, and, usually, the easiest way is seldom the most efficient. Since the MS developers are on a tight schedule, I suppose they invest very little time on writing optimized code.

Examples (and proof) of this are the bugs that are frequent on commercial apps and the need for frequent patches.

I wonder if it would be like this if the developers spent a little more time debugging and optimizing their code.


So, a new OS doesn't necessarily have to be more "resource-hungry". If the code is better written than before, it is possible to have more features and not use more resources.

When I tried Vista Business, the machine took 3% of a P4 2.8 HT CPU and 400 Mb of RAM just sitting there. No programs, no nothing. That is simply unacceptable.

I get your point, and I guess I should have made myself clearer. When has an MS OS ever used less resources than an older version?

Another point I forgot to mention is the hardware that most people use. When XP was released back in '01, 256MB RAM was the norm and 512MB was enthusiast-level. 256MB ran XP much as 1GB runs Vista. As bigger and badder programs came out, RAM size increased to its present day norm of 1GB (2GB for enthusiasts). Hardware will evolve the same way for Vista.