OH NOOOO!!!

I did it.

I went and installed vista......

silly boy :O)

I'll probably just keep using XP until Windows 7 comes out. There's some rumor floating around that DirectX 10 might come to XP anyhow.

That is...unless I get a MacBook Pro first...

32bit? 64bit?

Mt father has a notebook with vista32, while a mem-eater, it doesn't look all that bad. As for the mem eating: the notebook has 1Gb and if you start Cubase and Halion3, then you got ~300Mb for your samples.. meaning that -minus Cubase 'n things- about 600..650Mb is consumed by the OS.

Well Im running 32, and only 1 gig of ram its looking ok at the moment, its only using about 48% of that with firefox and 4 tabs open, I will post this then check what its eating without firefox running.

Its about the same actually, seems like Vista uses about 35-40% of my 1 gig, but it seems to be managing the memory a lot better than XP, so although its eating more, its using whats left a lot better.

at least seems that way just now I have yet to really put it under any pressure.

One of the "gotcha's" with memory usage under Vista is that the OS will pre-emptively preload everything under the sun 'in case you want to use it later'. A whole slew of unreleated applications ill automatically be loaded into RAM dduring quiet moments, so they start faster should you actually choose to open one.
Should any active program need to use memory itself, it will automatically unload some cached stuff again to make room for the real data it needs.

there's some pro's end cons to this approach -- I'm not really sure what to think of it myself.

I have never had an issue with the speed at which apps load into memory.

Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will...

that's not what I was getting at, all I meant to say was that it's eating more because it's loading extra 'unnecesary' things in that will be freed up at a moments notice. It *needs* less memory to run decently than it may appear at first.

And I thought it was going to be another 'my hard drive's failed and I've lost all my code!' posts.

Vista eats up roughly 40% of my 1.5GB system too, so perhaps that's a rough minimum storage ratio for it to consume, until you get like 4GB or something and it runs out of stuff to cache. Hopefully.

Hah, so did I.

At the moment, I'm using Vista which has been hibernated daily (or left on overnight), rather than shut down, for the past week-and-a-bit. Doing just about anything (un-hibernating, loading any app, deleting a file) sends my HD into fits of head thrashing and Vista's UI response times become measured in tens of seconds.

Vista claims that 656MB (out of 1GB) is being used. Though, perhaps rather helpfully (?), as I look at the performance monitor, this usage figure is steadily reducing by about 1MB per 5-10 seconds.... and it's just bottomed out at 639MB.

Outlook 2007 has consistently caused problems. It does not want to work nicely with the security plugin from F-Secure (as part of my AV/Firewall package) and performance is atrocious. Opening Outlook takes ages and then, when the first message is downloaded, another round of disk-thrashing ensues as it diverts the message to F-Secure. It is not F-Secure at fault though, because it only happens with Outlook and it never happened before I installed F-Secure. Googling brings up many stories of poor Outlook performance with Vista. If it didn't have such a great interface and wasn't so easy to configure, I'd be using something else.

I'm having to use a beta nVidia driver, because the latest production version causes numerous BSOD's when playing Lost Planet.

As compared to my (thankfully retained) Windows XP install, Vista is slower when the system is busy but faster when it isn't. Windows XP 'wins' as far as I'm concerned because the overall experience is much more speed-consistent. At least when XP starts to get sluggish, you know it's because you're trying to unrar a 4G file whilst uTorrent is re-checking downloads and you're browsing a thumbnailed folder with 1000+ uncached images and videos. With Vista, your HD goes nuts with no good reason.

At first, I put it down to indexing and preloading, but those services are supposed to butt out when you actually want to do something with your PC. At least, the newer search-indexing service under XP does this (it even tells you this if you hover over the system tray icon for it). Vista's so-called niceties seem to be detrimental, rather than assistive.

Oh, and RAM usage has now dropped to 600MB.

When I had my Amiga, I could tell you what it was doing by the noise the HD was making. It didn't try to be clever, it just did what I asked, when I asked it to. I put 16MB extra RAM into it and I could load any and every app I needed to use (and some I didn't). Deluxe Paint loaded in 2 seconds. It would have been faster, but it was a 2MB executable and the HD would only transfer at 1MB/s. I just loaded MS Paint and it took the same amount of time. Show me where the progress is?! mspaint.exe is 474KB, has a fraction of the feature-set and yet manages to grab 1.7MB of RAM when loaded.

My PC is perhaps 2 orders of magnitude faster (at raw processing) than my Amiga. HD transfers are 50-60 times faster, seek times are more than halved since I had my 1.6GB HD and graphics performance is so much improved that any direct comparison would be futile and may as well be regarded as infiniftely faster.

Of course, Windows Vista offers many improvements in stability and security. We have full memory protection, with hardware assist. We have compatability with tens of thousands of peripherals. The graphics subsystem is completely modular with no app compatability issues. The sound subsystem is near-perfect (as far as usability and features are concerned, Creative might argue against this, but that's another story). Networking is also now ubiquitous (though not without its issues, which are to be expected in a complex system).

However, Windows (Vista) is designed to be used by complete muppets. It just so happens that experts also use it. Muppets need protection, from themselves as well as others. Muppets can delete important system files (Vista replaces them), muppets can run any old exe (anti-virus programs stop them), muppets don't know what an IP address is, how DHCP works or how their email gets delivered.

Why can we not have a lightweight Windows? One that doesn't bundle fax, paint, media player (yes, I know, Windows N), movie maker... one that doesn't have a security center (I know how to manage my own security, thanks anyway), doesn't pre-load programs (I know when I want to use stuff and I'll take a 5 second wait whilst it loads, just leave my RAM alone please), doesn't index every file (I know where stuff is already, thanks), doesn't generate system restore points (I'll make a backup when I feel like it), has a really good task switcher (Linux has more than one to choose from), doesn't have a bloated networking system (just give me TCP/IP, I'll add DHCP and NAT support if I need it, just like I'll add network shares if I need them and then probably using something better than Windows default offering).

Cut out all the crap. Just leave me with a bare-bones OS that, if I want, I can add things to. I should be able to run my PC with 512MB and have room to spare. Sure, i'll add more when dealing with large datasets (graphics for games, HD video) but to sit here with 600MB used, when all I have open is Opera... come on.

Rant over. I'm done. I want my Amiga back.

..well..I don't know what is it about this Windows 7 at all, but since I can see whats going on with Vista, I turn myself on to MAC and I am very very happy...windows regarding, im with XP pro, until something quality finally see light of the day from M$...

I think the only problem people are having with vista is that it demands more well, better system specs. Lets face it, as OS's improve just like games they need better systems to run them.

Vista for example renders everything you see on a 3D Surface so you actually do need a good 3D card with a healthy amount of on board ram.

Iv found out some other little things about it already which are kinda cool. I will post more on these later.

Yeah, Vista is nice to work in. :)

But to be honest, anyone that develops games to run on Windows should have it anyway or access to it so they dont run into beef with the OS!

I have Suse Pro installed on a third partition and it rarely gets used.

Now I need a cheap Mac and I'll be set!

Dabz

i've think you play lemmings ;)

Gona change waht I said a little, Vista looks really nice, and I love the feel of it with the 3D Dekstop download from chris.com or what ever the url is but it is slow. at least for me.

My system score is 4.5 so I was expeciting it to run a little faster. but once I started tasking the OS with a few tasks at the same time it really started to lag.

I copied a cd from my local drive to me local HD, and that action bogged the full system down. which surprised me since the CPU was hardly doing anything, only about 10% activity, and the memory was only at about 50%. so why was the system getting bogged down.

These are things I hope service pack 1 will fix..

My plan at the moment is to install a few games, get a few apps installed and see how it goes, but if things dont improve then I will be goign back to XP, and if SP1 does not improve the OS for my setup then its XP Permanent or Linux. its a shame.

Me too finaly moved to vista on the Gamer PC.
Thoe i ned more ram. 700 mb ram is not good.

I keep windows cause blitz3d runns best in windows :)

waawaaoops.

Im gonna wait 2-3 years before i even touch it (again)

well iv been wanting to play eve for a while now, and it seems like vista will not let me run it. so bye bye vista, hello old faithful xp.

Yep, Vista currently is a knacker for gaming, well, high-end gaming unless you have a souped up setup.

Do what I do, stick XP on another partition for gaming.

I tend to work in Vista all the time and when I want to do a drop of tomb-raiding, I just go into XP.

Dabz

well vista is gone for now, it runs fine just a matter of it not being supported by the games i wana play yet.

I will re install it the second that the games I like get better support for it.

If you're talking about Eve Online, seems the people over at iexbeta.com/wiki managed to get it working - it's marked as 100% fine.

Count me in!

An interesting theory. Too bad it isn't true. For starters, Vista is only marginally better than XP, (and certainly not better,in any sense of the word, than something like, say BERYL) depending largely on driver support for your hardware, and what sort of applications you use it for.

Not if you have an nVidia gfx card. I get a noticeable performance boost running Blitz3D stuff on Cedega compared to Windows (not counting the TabletPC versions of windows that won't run Blitz3D games at all, without disabling Advanced Text Services).

FlameDuck wrote


Not true for me with the experiances I've had with Vista. imo Vista needs atleast 3 service packs before it's even remotely better than XP.