Anybody have feedback on Vista?

[RWade]

Anybody have any feedback on Vista?

I'm getting Vista Ultimate with my kickass system.

The game I am most interested in with the new horse power I am getting is Flight Simulator X.

I've been reading rumors that the frames per second in some cases are worse than on XP.

I'm a Microsoft fan even with all the quirks. Nobody else has shown me better. :roll:

Now I have a question for the MainGear guys.

Will I have a problem if I slap in my XP hard drive for a dual boot to compare frame rates between XP and Vista?

[HCA]

I have Vista on my MainGear, and it has it's advantages as well as disadvantages. It's fast and has a nice set of features plus I like the "feel" of it much more than XP. Disadvantages are mainly due to it's recent release. My iPod will not properly sync with iTunes which does **** me off, and other applications won't work or have issues - Like Adobe flash player for instance would not work until I downloaded a recently released fix for it. I guess as Vista matures my level of pleasure from Vista will increase. :wink:

[Plan1x]

RWade,

You are probably going to incounter problems if you try that. Your going to have to have a cleaned fully formated seperate hard drive with XP and then create a partition between the two hard drives XP and Vista.

[RWade]

Thanks for the input guys.

[Badger]

Here is a good article from ExtremeTech regarding Vista and how well it is accomodating different games.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2090571,00.asp

[RottynDawg]

Great article Badger; thank you for posting that. I may upgrade to Vista sooner than I expected :)

[Mikebot]

I like Vista as an OS, but I'm seriously considering going back to XP for a while until game performance gets straightened out.

nVidia's drivers just stink. I upgraded tonight to the 100.64 drivers, and they're still feature-depleted. Display settings don't save, forceware settings don't seem to work at all (forced AA/AF, etc.), there's no display optimization wizard, etc.

Also, there's no support for driver-level overclocking programs. I had to flash my 8800GTS's BIOS with the overclocking settings I used in XP. And to think I've got all this great graphical power, but none of the forceware image quality settings work. It's pretty frustrating, and while I understand the challenges nVidia is facing, the fact is they have no excuses for dropping the ball on the drivers.

So I think it's wise to stick with XP for now. There are no DirectX games coming out for at least a few months, and performance is just infinitely better in XP. I hate to think about going through the whole tedious process of doing a clean install of XP and reinstalling all my games, but I'm definitely not happy with Vista as a gaming platform.

[HCA]

I would have to agree if you have XP to keep it for the next few months, BUT if you're purchasing a new system than I would order Vista. My 2 cents. :D

[DarkStar]

What is everyone's opinion on getting the rig dual booted with XP Pro and Vista Ultimate?

Some places are recommending it but never having had a dual boot rig before I am not sure what, if any, negatives there would be (well other then the OS's taking a huge chunk of HD space.)

[Mikebot]

I wouldn't dual boot for just the reasons you stated.

The smartest thing to do is just grab XP with an upgrade coupon. Vista's upgrade uses an image instead of installing files piece by piece like past Windows versions did, so doing an upgrade installation is mostly hassle-free. Though I think an upgrade version does still allow you to do a clean install.

[whorton5]

Our MSFS X seems to be running fine in the machine in my signature line in full native resolution on the 24" Dell. My question is...can anyone recommend a good joystick? We are looking for a force feedback one. I notice Logitech seems to have all the Vista drivers posted for their models, but it appears Saitek doesn't. Has anyone tried it with a Xbox 360 wireless for Windows? Are there other games I could use the Xbox with on the PC?

[Story of the Ghost]

My frustration level with Vista keeps elevating.

The product looks snazzy, but I keep running into security conflicts and general odd behavior.

On the security side, I was looking forward to having one administrator account that loads all software, and then invidual non-administrator accounts for the people that use the machine. However, I'm finding that software loaded under the administrator account will only run under the administrator account. For example, Rhapsody, Steam games (Dark Messiah) and Shadowbane. Games might initially launch under regular user account, but then a security feature somewhere blocks access to a file or registry and kills the application. So now, everyone logs on as administrator to play, and I've lost all control. I've lost all patience with trying to indivualy flag program objects as "full control for all users" or "run under XP SP2 compatability". I thought this was one of the primary selling points of Vista, but it's falling flat on it's face for me.

Other odd behavior...extremely slow exits from games and powerdown times, won't wake up from hibernate mode and requires a hard crash to reboot, blue screens of death at random (three so far in a month of ownership).

As this is the first true gaming machine I've owned, games when running look spectacular to me....but my eye may not be catching how great things really should be. I am getting significant stutters in high intensity battles within Dark Messiah (battle with the undead cyclops)...but I'm just so used to this I'm not sure if I should be expecting more from this machine (Prelude, 8800 graphics card, 2gig RAM, Core Duo 6600).

If I could re-order my machine, I'd go with XP for now.

[spincut]

near the end that article mentioned something about the HAL layer being removed and the sound cards hardware acceleration and higher forms of EAX not really working anymoe, is this a big thing and does it mkae getting a sound card somewhat less useful and onboard sound somewhat more useful? since i'd think not haivng hardware acceleration would kind of make getting a Xi-Fi kind of pointless.

[Brian]

Does anyone have any idea when Vista SP1 will be out?

[RottynDawg]

Microsoft's stance is that it will release in time for Longhorn. They were claiming the second half of 2007 but that may get pushed back :) I haven't seen MS offer a hard date yet.

[XBarbarian]

I started with XP on my F131, but went to Vista Ultimate, I guess a bout 2 months ago. I really dig it. My shiznit is uber fast.

In the end tho, a OS is, well just 'there'. It isn't revolutionary, but it works nicely.