Originally posted by: Fox5
Hmm, I can't seem to get ati's catalyst control center or their new beta drivers working correctly. They say they've installed fine, but windows won't initialize them.
Oh, and for my audigy 2 zs, is it possible to get the driver to sync with the creative control panel? Should I be using the XP driver or the Vista driver?
Ok, my problems apparently stemmed from the fact that I tried to install the windows xp nforce2 drivers. They install on Vista, but apparently don't play nice. I wasn't able to clean my system of them either, I had to do a format and a reinstall of Vista in order to get my graphics card working again.
The audigy 2 zs works fine with the xp drivers, but the eax console doesn't appear to work right. No big deal, who really used that anyway? Unfortunately, you still need the software cd that came with the audigy in order to fully enable the card's funcionality, which is a shame that the software isn't bundled with the drivers. (AudioHQ seems fairly necessary to setting up the card)
As for vista, it may be my imagination, but it seems that I/O intensive tasks, such as reading/writing to the harddrive or Internet connections are faster. At the same time though, the much higher cpu utilization seems to make multi tasking in Vista rather unreasonable. One task can be briskly operating, but open up internet explorer and browse for a while and I'll find the background task has practically slowed to a halt. On the other hand though, IE7 is a much improved browser over 6, and assuming it has no major security flaws should be suitable as a primary web browser.
Oh, and I like Win+Tab, it's a much more graphical representation of what you're doing than alt+tab is, and I'd place its usability on par with those multiple desktop features some programs (I think nvidia's drivers among them) offer. Maybe it may not be as fast as you'd like, but it definetely makes no mistake about what you're doing or what window you're bringing up.
Haven't tried games or anything like that yet, but the slightly nicer GUI of Vista does make it nicer than XP in my opinion, and its current driver difficulties (disregarding any lack of performance in games, though I haven't tried that yet) seems to be on par with Windows Server 2003. Windows Update also seems more able to find up to date/correct drivers than XP's did, but that may just be that all Vista drivers are less than a year old, it could fall into the same state of antiquety that XP's windows update did.
The OS seems more sluggish in general than XP, but seems to keep up under heavy loads better. Heavy loads that would make XP unusable seem to be handled better in Vista, with "Not Responding" programs that will actually start responding again rather than crash as soon as you click on them, and the task scheduler seems to be better as it appears that whatever the user is doing is given precedence, so it doesn't seem like a background task can still eat up all your cpu cycles and degrade your PC into an unusable mess. (of course, that also has the side effect that multitasking performance seems to be in the crapper, though that could just be due to the higher cpu requirements of everything, but wasn't aeroglass supposed to reduce requirements?)
Que mas? The little widgets thing sidebar is kind of neat, though I only really care for the cpu/mem usage meter so far sine it lets me know just how much Vista is killing my computer. It's rather disheartening to see 40% memory usage at bootup, knowing that includes the virtual memory as well and thus nearly all of my ram is being used. I could see some of the other widgets being useful as well, such as the stock ticker, and the egg timer, they save the pain of having to get external apps to do the same or googling for the information.
Standby doesn't always seem to work the same, at times I've seen it just put a DOS prompt on my monitor, while at other times it puts my monitor into power saving mode (ie, no signal).
Remote desktop works well, or at least seems to with the little use I did with it. Connected to the Vista computer from an XP Pro computer seems to offer slower remote desktoping performance than XP Pro to XP Pro did. XP Pro to Vista noticably lags, whereas XP Pro to XP Pro had near real time performance assuming the LAN connection was good enough. (generally I found having them on the same network was good enough, though 802.11b could be slow enough to cause problems) Didn't test out remote desktop very much though.
The performance rating thing is confusing.
There's a wierd error message saying drivers are causing the computer to boot slowly, yet the computer (once to the log in screen) starts faster than XP did to me (though it takes longer to get to the log in screen). Both drivers listed are microsoft drivers, but I had two different drivers prior to the format (I believe one nvidia and one creative) which leads me to think the system may just be picking out two random drivers and complaining about a nonexistant problem.
Edit: My mistake on questioning the bug reporter. It does appear that some drivers (or something) are preventing the computer from fully loading as fast as it should, however because Vista appears to give full preference to whatever the user is trying to do, the OS is ready to go and usable prior to everything loading. I guess that could be called an improved task scheduler.
The rating thing needs a better explanation of what the numbers mean as well, I take a 3 as a "3 out of 10" type thing, and I know my computer's not that bad. Hopefully the rating thing will remain an advisement rather than forcing upgrades to run software.
My athlon xp 3200+ is rated as a 3.4, my 1.25GB of ram as a 3.6, my primary hard disk as 3.7 (the rating for this seems to be made on speed + free capacity, but why should primary partition matter when I have two others?), Radeon X800XT as 5.9 for graphics, yet 5.5 for gaming graphics because I only have 256MB of graphics memory. Honestly, I don't think I've ever encountered a situation where the performance of a game was more limited by the amount of graphics ram than by the actual graphics chip.