Busting Vista Myths

[Robor]

Originally posted by: NothinmanThe amount of disk space required for the system is completely orthogonal to the speed at which it operates.

I was pretty sure what you meant but had to go look it up just in case. I was right.

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

My Intel X3100 GPU on my driver gets absolutely horrible performance in Vista. I can't even run CSS on lowest settings with a playable framerate (usually get ~20 FPS). I've heard the performance is much better in XP (~40 FPS on medium settings).

 

[jonmcc33]

Originally posted by: blackangst1
Yes. Just fine. Unless youre going to throw in encoding and shit, it DOES run just fine. I pretty much know for a fact you havent used Vista in a 1GB memory environment to back up your statement, so pfft. My mother has 1GB and she even uses scanning, pic editing, and other stuff JUST FINE.

Your lack of knowledge not only makes you look foolish, but it gets old.

VERY wrong. My Dell D400 had 1GB in it originally. I upgraded it to 2GB just so it could run somewhat normally. You lose and your jumping to conclusions makes you look foolish. Thanks!

 

[Seppe]

Originally posted by: t3h l337 n3wb
My Intel X3100 GPU on my driver gets absolutely horrible performance in Vista. I can't even run CSS on lowest settings with a playable framerate (usually get ~20 FPS). I've heard the performance is much better in XP (~40 FPS on medium settings).

u've heard? ...

 

[Seppe]

[/quote]

VERY wrong. My Dell D400 had 1GB in it originally. I upgraded it to 2GB just so it could run somewhat normally. You lose and your jumping to conclusions makes you look foolish. Thanks!
[/quote]

oh please... i run a dell laptop with 2 gb, and vista x64 is working great with them, and i do photoshop and edit photos on a daily basis, play war3 from time to time, and do office apps too, without a hickup. i played war3 with virusscaning even and didn't feel a thing.

some of the things people say just pisses me of so much...

 

[Arkaign]

Originally posted by: Seppe

Originally posted by: t3h l337 n3wb
My Intel X3100 GPU on my driver gets absolutely horrible performance in Vista. I can't even run CSS on lowest settings with a playable framerate (usually get ~20 FPS). I've heard the performance is much better in XP (~40 FPS on medium settings).

u've heard? ...

Well, I've seen systems come through the shop here with Vista loaded on Intel graphics chipsets, and even after updating to the latest drivers (last one was mid-november, IIRC), the gaming performance on Vista was abysmal. Reloading the system with XP improved things dramatically as far as that was concerned, amongst other issues. This was repeated on configurations such as :

512MB / Celeron D 3.2Ghz
1GB / Pentium D 940
1GB / C2D E4300
2GB / C2D E6600

Of course, it *must* be said :

(1)- Trying to game on Intel GPU video is somewhat asinine to begin with. I always recommended something like an X1950GT, or even a 7300GT, whatever was $50-$100 that a customer wouldn't balk too severely at, for light gaming use. Even the weak ATI and Nvidia discrete cards are much much better than any onboard Video.

(2)- To see such a dramatic performance in 3d with Intel video between XP and Vista says a lot more about the drivers than about the OS version. (Intel's Vista drivers are awful for gaming)

(3)- Vista with 1GB is fine for regular use (Web, Messaging, Office apps), and runs similarly to XP with 512MB. Gaming with 1GB on Vista with pretty much any recent game is a real drag, and similar to gaming on XP with 512MB. Gaming on Vista really calls for 2GB or more of Ram, which narrows the difference considerably compared to XP. 2GB is the baseline for reasonable gaming on XP these days as well. There are some examples where XP w/2GB runs smoother than Vista w/2GB (SupCom, BF2, a few others), simply because XP does use less ram. Vista does a good job moving things out of the way when you game, but even so, it's bigger, newer, has more features, and takes more ram. So, 2GB on XP works for gaming about the way 3GB on Vista does.

(4)- Ram is so cheap, using it as a hatchet against Vista is sort of ridiculous. I bought 4GB of DDR2-800 from the egg for like $80 recently, for a customer E6750 build, so at prices like those, there's no reason not to get at least 2GB, preferably 4 or more.

(5)- Older hardware, you should stick with XP, without a doubt. In my experience, Vista runs poorly on single-core, low bandwidth older systems. It also seems to be very sensitive to hard drive performance, which makes sense, given that it's constantly moving things in and out of memory, and accessing your drive in an attempt (to varying degrees of success) of improving program access.

(6)- Personally, Vista doesn't do anything for me. I bought multiple copies, and dread the rare times that I boot to it these days. I tested it from early Longhorn status, and have found the final product not very exciting. Of course, it's an OS. It shouldn't be exciting. The best compliment to an OS is that it just gets the job done and doesn't get in your way. There's just something about Vista that irks me. Even after extensive tweaking to get the layout and interface set to my liking, it doesn't feel or look right to me. I felt the same way about 9X. My favorite MS OSes have been NT 4, 2K, and XP (with the classic look, luna FTL). Recently, after some patching, I had two of my Vista installs suddenly de-activate, and they wouldn't re-activate online. After hassling with the phone re-activation process on one, I'm just going to format the other Vista drives I have and use the space for something else. I'll stick with booting to my one Vista box once in a blue moon, XP for day-to-day stuff, and wait patiently for Vienna. I imagine after the unprecedented backlash against Vista, that the sleeping giant will come back swinging with their best work yet (similar to how XP came after ME).

(7)- If you love Vista or hate it, it doesn't bother me. Like or dislike whatever you want and don't apologize for it. Just keep the personal attacks, condescending remarks, and other useless blather to yourself. Attacking someone for liking/disliking a particular OS is insanely childish and pointless.

 

[Seppe]

sry for appearing offensive and sry for being racional and logical, but what i tried to point out with "u've heard? ..." was that people claim stuff without actually researching them... this is what bothers me the most in this forum, and most vista topics. people just dont take the time to go though information, and when someone starts a topic on something they just come up with that info... and u know the rest.

anyways im a happy vista user, for me it does everything xp can, so i dont think i have any reason to not stay with it. i bought it couse i thought i could save some money instead of buying an xp now and vista 2 years down the road.

aslo id like to say that i understand that some of you might have problems with vista, but im sure it'll be worked out eventually. but saying vista sucks and that its a loud a shit is just too much.

 

[jonmcc33]

Originally posted by: Seppe
oh please... i run a dell laptop with 2 gb, and vista x64 is working great with them, and i do photoshop and edit photos on a daily basis, play war3 from time to time, and do office apps too, without a hickup. i played war3 with virusscaning even and didn't feel a thing.

some of the things people say just pisses me of so much...

LOL! WTF are you talking about? Did you even read who I quoted and what I was responding to? I know that Vista runs best with 2GB RAM. I never denied that. I stated that. You have issues.

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

I was actually quite happy with Vista on my Compaq laptop, except for 2 major issues: the lackluster gaming performance and sleep mode crashes (this seems to be a common problem amongst Vista users). Every time I put my laptop on standby, it would lock up when I tried to bring it back to normal mode.

Oh, that, and dual booting XP has provided me with quite a huge headache:
http://forums.anandtech.com/me...id=34&threadid=2135809

 

[Seppe]

Originally posted by: jonmcc33

Originally posted by: Seppe
oh please... i run a dell laptop with 2 gb, and vista x64 is working great with them, and i do photoshop and edit photos on a daily basis, play war3 from time to time, and do office apps too, without a hickup. i played war3 with virusscaning even and didn't feel a thing.

some of the things people say just pisses me of so much...

LOL! WTF are you talking about? Did you even read who I quoted and what I was responding to? I know that Vista runs best with 2GB RAM. I never denied that. I stated that. You have issues.

could run somewhat normally = runs best with??
im not a language expert, but i dont think its the same thing!

 

[jonmcc33]

Originally posted by: Seppe
could run somewhat normally = runs best with??
im not a language expert, but i dont think its the same thing!

I still don't know what you're talking about. My discussion that you walked in on was about how I had 1GB RAM on the laptop and it performed like crap. I upgraded to 2GB and everything was good (mostly).

Now you are arguing what I just replied to you about Vista running best with 2GB RAM and what I said before about my laptop running somewhat normal with 2GB RAM? What does that have to do with what you said in the beginning? Here, I will quote you again on that below...

VERY wrong. My Dell D400 had 1GB in it originally. I upgraded it to 2GB just so it could run somewhat normally. You lose and your jumping to conclusions makes you look foolish. Thanks!

oh please... i run a dell laptop with 2 gb, and vista x64 is working great with them, and i do photoshop and edit photos on a daily basis, play war3 from time to time, and do office apps too, without a hickup. i played war3 with virusscaning even and didn't feel a thing.

some of the things people say just pisses me of so much...

Now please answer me on that. What are you talking about here because your comment about being a "language expert" had nothing to do with this. I'd really like to know WTF you are talking about with the above post that you made. It makes ZERO sense at all.

You don't like that I said "somewhat normally"? I have a Dell D400 that's 3 years+ old. I wouldn't play any game on it nor would I do Photoshop on it. It has a single core Pentium M. What part of that are you not apparently grasping?

 

[blackangst1]

Originally posted by: jonmcc33

Originally posted by: blackangst1
Yes. Just fine. Unless youre going to throw in encoding and shit, it DOES run just fine. I pretty much know for a fact you havent used Vista in a 1GB memory environment to back up your statement, so pfft. My mother has 1GB and she even uses scanning, pic editing, and other stuff JUST FINE.

Your lack of knowledge not only makes you look foolish, but it gets old.

VERY wrong. My Dell D400 had 1GB in it originally. I upgraded it to 2GB just so it could run somewhat normally. You lose and your jumping to conclusions makes you look foolish. Thanks!

So...because it doesnt work for YOU it's not true? MAAAANY poeple run Vista with 1 gig and have zero problems. if the majority is true, the generally its true. Thats how generalities work-theyre generally true. Just like my experiences...my PC has always pretty much just limped along on XP...3 or 4 BSOD per year. Im going on over a year and not one in Vista. Thats true of most people. does that mean XP is crap? IMO yes, but generally, no.

Get it?

 

[jonmcc33]

Sorry, I'm still laughing because you said you "pretty much knew I haven't used Vista in 1GB memory environment" and I clearly have. Can't admit being wrong can you? You're quite the presumptuous fool and you have nothing to say but that everyone that runs Vista on 1GB RAM is just screaming along. Wow. I am...stunned.

I can find quiet a bit of forums and posts with people that say Vista's sweet spot is 2GB RAM. I guess they are all idiots? You know more than they do?

 

[Nothinman]

I can find quiet a bit of forums and posts with people that say Vista's sweet spot is 2GB RAM.

And? Most people say that XP's "sweet spot" is 1G although lots of people get along with 512M or even 256M just fine.

I guess they are all idiots? You know more than they do?

Not really relevant but probably true.

 

[t3h l337 n3wb]

Yeah, about Vista gaming performance being equal with XP, definitely not true in my case. I just got my dual boot up and running properly (with native SATA support in XP), and I get twice the FPS in CSS (fy_iceworld) on XP (~30 vs 15). I have almost nothing installed on both, and I'm using the latest video drivers. That's pretty much the only reason why I'm dual booting; once SP1 (hopefully) fixes my standby problem, I'll be using Vista most of the time.

 

[IEC]

Some good info here, but I'd still like to point out that for many people, XP SP2 is still a better fit.

The other thing is many corporations and institutions are unwilling to make the switch to Vista until at least SP1... my university IT dept refuses to run Vista because it does not have all the issues ironed out, and driver and application support are still lacking. We do have a test lab here with Vista/Linux dual boots though.

 

[Bateluer]

Originally posted by: Spartan Niner
Some good info here, but I'd still like to point out that for many people, XP SP2 is still a better fit.

The other thing is many corporations and institutions are unwilling to make the switch to Vista until at least SP1... my university IT dept refuses to run Vista because it does not have all the issues ironed out, and driver and application support are still lacking. We do have a test lab here with Vista/Linux dual boots though.

I find this amusing, personally. People preach doom and gloom about Vista because many schools and IT departments choose to remain with XP. What many people don't realize is that businesses took years to move from 98 to 2k and then to XP. My current employer only upgraded from 2k to XP in the middle of 2005. Corporations usually wait a few years to see bugs and issues exposed and ironed out.

 

[nerp]

Good point. And if home users always modeled themselves after businesses, why the heck would they buy consumer NAT devices and routers? Why would they buy consumer sound cards? Why would they install trialware without backing up? Some people don't even back up. Some people run P2P apps and run unknown exes in the hunt for warez, etc. Someone doing this but then claiming that they prefer to use XP SP2 because that's what corporations are doing is using some very selective judgement.

 

[Nothinman]

And if home users always modeled themselves after businesses, why the heck would they buy consumer NAT devices and routers? Why would they buy consumer sound cards?

Because software environment is extremely important but hardware isn't. The brand of NAT router or sound card won't affect your ability to connect to your corporate VPN but the OS you use can.

 

[will889]

I was a slow adopter if Vista myself but it took me a while along with better drivers now to finally use Vista more often over XP. I have two PC's that have Vista/XP/Linux (one with 6150 IGP the other with a 7950GT both use 2GB of memory) and I now use Vista more than XP on both and one of them has 6150 IGP and it run Vista Aero fine with a 4000+ San Diego core. Just for kicks I tried to play some games with the 6150 low res 1024x768 and compared Vista to XP and there was only about a 5-10% difference -- usually 5% with settings on medium (some low) but at least Aero runs fine even with IGP.

 

[smp]

edit

 

[KeypoX]

Originally posted by: AllGamer

Originally posted by: soonerproud

A Windows Vista Capable PC includes at least:

* A modern processor (at least 800MHz¹).
* 512 MB of system memory.
* A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable.

A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC includes at least:

* 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor¹).
* 1 GB of system memory.
* Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)², Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel.
* 40 GB of hard drive capacity with 15 GB free space.
* DVD-ROM Drive³.
* Audio output capability.
* Internet access capability.

Here is the specification from Microsoft for Aero.

# 1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor¹).
# 1 GB of system memory.
# Support for DirectX 9 graphics with a WDDM driver, 128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)², Pixel Shader 2.0 and 32 bits per pixel.

A Windows Vista Capable PC = Vista in underwear, no Aero, no nothing, to run at human patience acceptable speed.

A Windows Vista Premium Ready PC = Vista naked (no Aero) or downgraded visual Aero candies testing your patience. (must have at least a P4 or better)

A Windows Vista for Aero Ready PC = Duo2Core or AMD AM2 + $300+ DX9 capable video card

And these are real life performance usability speed test by Humans and for Humans and not some sterile bench by an automated script.

No man it requires a $5000 video card, a million dollar processor to even boot at a respectable time.

You are a bag man. It does not require a $300 video card for aero. I have a $100 video card (1900gt) and play crysis at med. And run vista very smooth.

While i do not agree with the op i think you can find any comment you want on the internet. The truth is that vista is slower PERIOD. but it prefer it, it looks better and searches better. And time in ms is to insignificant for me to notice. LOL $300 video card fckin top of the line video card is only $200 (8800gt)

 

[fishjie]

Originally posted by: BD2003
Truthfully, the Vista interface is so similar to XP, that if you actually need to retrain someone to use it, I'd have questioned why anyone would have hired them in the first place.

what's annoying is that with every new version of the OS, they make changes to the UI. yes, you can figure it out eventually, but the changes are stupid and pointless. the UI that existed before hand was just fine.

for example, I had learned how to use IIS just fine in XP, and then they went and switched the entire UI. i would argue that it is completely different and not similar at all. yeah, with enough experimenting i figured out how to do the stuff i already knew how to do, but it was a complete waste of time. the new UI accomplished nothing.

people grow accustomed to a UI and become optimized to use it and simply dont want to relearn it every single time.

 

[stash]

In the case of the IIS UI, yes there is a learning curve, as there is with any change. But the old user experience of clicking on properties of objects and getting a dialog with a ton of tabs was horrible. Once you take a few minutes to figure out how the new UI works, I think most people would appreciate the change.

Other UI changes in Vista aren't as useful (hiding the network device properties behind like four clicks comes to mind), but IIS is a good example of good redesign.

 

[nerp]

Breadcrumbs are a huge improvement in the Vista UI. Enormously helpful.