Happy VISTA blues

To mix things up I been messing around with VISTA I like what I saw however all they have really done on the outside of the user interface is mess all the decision trees up as to where to find everything. This is now there and that is now here kinda deal.

The biggest beef I found was the Hardware support is now up to DX10 and I ran the pre evaluation tool on my system and it of course said my scanners and printers and external audio sound rack and joysticks will not be supported. I can’t get VISTA drivers for them either the company's wont support them.

Motherboard drivers and Graphics display adapter as well as CPU were supported. My system was just not all the other things Oh my HP camera was out as well.

I figure it would cost me around $1500.00 CAN to replace the hardware VISTA skipped out on me as not supported plus the loss of XP Pro, I purchased say another $200.00 bucks not to mention my USB Laser mouse I never got around to trying the full drivers for that another $200+ in cash. Software bundles invested because I like to own them over the last say since Win98SE another 2 grand. Around $3900.00 just off the top of my head at this point and none of that includes all of the prior hardware I have invested in heavily since Win98SE and even XP. $10 grand I am out easy in the last 5 years if I switch over fully to Vista and not the DVD bootable ISO Beta 5384 version Image I downloaded to try out but their full final version. (Purchased DVD burner to make ISO image DOH!) Waste of time as Vista was a bomb for older hardware support but a learning curve none the less.

I have enough spare parts to build 3 Win98 boxes and say three more XP systems moderately high end that will run high end software but not at full settings anymore. 10 grand to support one main game system out of the home over the last five years of OS and hardware support.

The beef I have right up front on Vista is that M$ left even more compatibility mode out of VISTA then they did for XP and when XP was released that was a Nightmare with faulty service pack 1 and all the vendors left scrambling to re-write software.

VISTA has broken away from third party builds unless you want to invest heavily yet again in hardware. Looks like this last build from M$ will force most people even some older core guys to purchase a retail box from one of the large core manufactures simply to bypass any compatibility issues.

I even managed to blue screen and memory dump VISTA trying to force the drivers in for my External Hercules Sound rack that basically supports all my USB devices as it’s got 4 ports. And the speakers sub and headset plugged into it. I was not disconnecting all the cables and resetting the system BIOS to turn on the onboard audio but I wanted to hear the sounds VISTA was proly squawking out so I tried to force the Herc driver in and blue screen mem dumped Vista so hard it was almost funny.

So no illusions about VISTA being a better game platform and that's why it's out here to replace game consoles and movie theatres. I managed to blue screen it 20 minutes after original install.

Oh I used Partition magic and made a nice 34 Gig partition onto my main C: drive so I could dual boot my XP Pro and VISTA so I would not lose my current working XP install and all the crap on the other HD I have games loaded into.

I formatted the new partition right at the desktop in XP and VISTA went right out the backdoor. However the DOS level DUAL boot option still exists and you need to select get this.....this is another new term from Microsoft...It does not say Boot to XP or XP Pro even it says boot to Microsoft or boot to an older version of Microsoft. Now we know where we stand in regards to M$. Yes we are $hit out of luck.

I downloaded the Vista Beta 2 (64-bit) and installed into into VMware on my Athlon X2 4200+ machine with a 74GB Raptor HDD and 2GB RAM. It runs very slowly. (XP runs well this way, FYI) It will often appear to lock up for a few seconds and then un-freeze. And the RAM usage is astronomical- 650 MB at goddamn IDLE?! I thought, "you HAVE to be kidding me"- but it is in fact the actual RAM usage for this OS!

So I certainly said blue as I ended up turning the air blue when demoing this OS. And I thought that XP was a pile- MSFT seems to have sunk to even newer lows, even for them...

Nice I'm the only happy person.

I find it odd that people still b!tch about the memory usage. Its still beta and turn off all the useless sh!t thats enabled by default. Unbelieveable.

Thanks for sharing all you guys are discovering with Vista! Ryan

I've already done so numerous times in other sections but I'll rehash some of it just for you.

On RAM usage, yes its quite high but if you disable all the useless bs and the services in line with an XP setup it'll go down to 400mb which isnt too unreasonable for a beta.

Things I've liked so far:

Linux like GUI's for installing.

Good support for USB sticks now, no more focking around with floppies.

64bit and 32bit both come on the same DVD.

Finally DVD only, CD's are slow and hopefully more games will go DVD.
Windows defender out of the box.

Windows update is no longer done though IE.

The networking centre was pretty cool.

The firewall is much better.

Media centre (although I didn't use it)

Good support for multiple sound cards, I can use my X-Fi for games and azalia for movies, etc.

The GUI is nice, even the basic one looks better then XP whilst running well even crappy graphics cards with default display drivers and integrated graphics with their proper drivers.

Priority for IO now not just CPU time.

Lots of little things I can't remember

Sucky things:

Superfetch is pointless chugs ram and does nothing useful.

Transparency is pointless, its just MS trying to be like Macs.

High memory usage, still beta and the XP-64 beta chugged heaps of memory as well (where was the outrage for that?)

Still somewhat slow.

All in all a nice evolutionary leap that fixes the problems in XP and various other things like DX.

It just brings up a wizard style thing. Much much quicker, easier and it doesn't crash from sh!tty IE for no focking reason!

Some things I forgot:

IE7 is ugly and still sh!tty.
WMP 11 tries to more mac like and blows.

IE is decoupled from windows explorer which roxors.

No idea. But I'm going to buy a business version from work to avoid all that crap.

Ya, that is quite sh!tty. I got sick of having to call ms to get crap activated for friends so I grabbed a copy of the corporate version from work and used their CD key. Worked a treat.

Activation and all that other crap only annoys the legit people, it does nothing to stop pirates. They'd be better off leaving it out.

I've got a friend that could sell me a coorporate copy but I never knew it bypassed the activation process or I'd already have bought it.

Business versions dont have to be activated they also don't take an image of the current hardware as well.

UPDATE AFTER VISTA!!

Anyone who has tried VISTA as a dual boot offering on C: Drive and wants to remove Vista by deleteing it off the Partition they created on C: Drive simply format that from the XP desktop (presumeing you are using XP home or Pro) partition and VISTA will be gone.

Now you will notice that when you reboot the DUAL BOOT window will still pop up and offer Microsoft as the primary OS (VISTA) of course it dosent say Vista... or An Older Version Of Windows.

This will get old fast as this dual boot menue will default to Microsoft looking for Vista and of course it will crash to a default screen saying that OS is of course unavailable because you deleted it.

So in short to remove the DUAL BOOT menue you will need to do 2 simple things anyone can manage.

First go to Windows Explorer and TOOLS/FOLDER OPTIONS and set Show Hidden files and folders. Also scroll down to Hide Protected Operating System Files (Recommended) and uncheck that box.

Now, find c:boot.ini

right click it, and remove its read-only property if it has one.

Now, open it in notepad (should just have to double click it.)

First two lines read like this:

[boot loader]
timeout=30

Change it to

[boot loader]
timeout=0


Now Open up your C: Drive folder and you will see a nice little folder called "Boot" this Boot folder belongs to VISTA and not XP you will send it to the recycle Bin but dont delete it just let it ride the out basket then reboot your XP install should come right back up to your password or desktop and never mention the dual boot menue again

When this fix is succesfull delete the Boot folder from your recycle bin.

Problem solved.

O]-[ that's Lex Luther not Lecturer and by the way...


]-[ELLO WUSY