Vista Any good yet?

I have an Opteron 148, 1gig of G.Skill ram and a 7800GT and it runs perfectly fine for me. I mostly just play HL2 and Counter-Strike Source. I also run Photoshop CS2.

I have not really noticed much of a difference performance wise from XP Pro. How long ago did you run it, during the beta phase?

If you want to run your older games, don't bother with Vista. Stay with XP. DX-10 is really the only reason a gamer would want to upgrade, and there are only a couple games at the moment which use (even parts of...) it.

If you want it all, dual booting with XP is the way to go. Not to mention that hard drives are cheap, which simplifies the process since it's not necessary to play with partitioning.

Having said that - The games I am currently playing (Bioshock, NWN2, Oblivion) run perfectly well even on 64 bit Vista. Planescape - Torment? Baldur's Gate? DOOM 1 or 2? (LOL!) I wouldn't even try... But so far all of the newer games I've tried run just fine. Theoretically, 32 bit should be better as far as backwards compatability, and for sure I had no issues when I was running that version of Vista.

I have had no troubles finding drivers for my hardware, so with new gear that's no longer an issue. I *have* had a little trouble finding the odd application tho. Some of the old favorites don't work, and I end up having to look harder for something else. For example, Vista 64 nukes Speedfan and CoreTemp for their security certificates not passing muster. For those, it turns out that my mobo maker has an app tailored to my board which does the same thing, though. So that wasn't a big deal. You could also change the security settings, if you were running into that issue on something that's supposed to run.

/thread_hijack

I recently rebuilt it from 32 bits when I got the new HDD. It rated 5.9 across the board, pre 3Ghz/333FSB overclock. When I saw that, I got all fired up and wanted to see a post overclock "6". But apparently 5.9 is all it gives out... Kinda like my ex in this respect: Never fully happy, no matter what. <grin> Gaming wise, it runs everything on full pretty at my monitor's 1680 by 1050 native resolution. Don't ask me how many frames per second, tho. "Smooth" and "Glitch-Free" are the standards under my roof... My old (AGP!!!) box was FAR FAR worse than what you have on your desk now. So it's a nice change.

From a hardware point of view: I verified there were 64 bit drivers for my stuff before screwing with it, and it went fine. Though it did hang on the first attempt to install. Went through on the second. Turns out that Vista 64 doesn't like to be installed on 4GB of RAM. Why that would be?? I have no idea. Pulled 2 DIMMS, installed, patched, and put the memory back in the machine. It's been solid since.

Most things run in "X-86 Compatability Mode" just fine. If there's an issue, so far it's always been because Vista 64 is *very* aggressive in denying anything from running unless it's digital certificate is proper. So a lot of our favorite shareware apps are rendered unusable. Hence the Speedfan and CoreTemp thing. But like I implied earlier - Common Sense Filter applies, and I don't bother with old stuff.

I need to dig around in the security console - The default permissions are way too strict. Besides the certificates thing, I actually had to unzip some .rar files to the desktop and move them manually since the system wouldn't allow me (with administratior permissions) to unpack directly to the intended locations.

From a strict security standpoint, it's for the better. Despite clearly being security-overkill for a home computer.


/end_hijack