Tom's Hardware > Forum > Windows Vista > Vista General Discussion > Upgrade from XP to 64 bit Vista?
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Sad Panda   10-26-2008 at 10:01:36 PM

I was wondering if my gaming would benefit from upgrading form Windows XP SP3 to Vista SP1 64 bit Ultimate. I can't find any reviews that directly compare the two, for the games I like to play (Oblivion, Crysis...). I know Vista will let me see all 4 Gigs of my ram and use Dx10, but people say it's bloated so I don't know if it will be any better for my comp.

Here's my specs:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale 3.0GHz
BIOSTAR TForce TP43D2A7 Intel P43 ATX Intel Motherboard
Rosewill 500W Power Supply
Ram: 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2 1066
NVIDIA 8800GTS 512M OC

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br3nd064   10-26-2008 at 10:53:17 PM
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When first installed, it may seem like it's bloated, buy you can turn off a lot of the things that slow it down. I switched from xp pro to vista ultimate x64 and thought it was more snappy, probably because it could use all of my ram.

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notherdude   10-26-2008 at 11:08:43 PM
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Vista isn't really bloated - that's a myth - part of the reason that myth got started was the poor drivers and crapware loaded retail boxes and so on that plauged Vista before SP 1 and also 'superfetch', Vista's very aggressive pre-caching which fills up RAM with frequently used code - it actually speeds things up but gives you the impression Vista is a RAM hog because system monitors will show a lot of RAM in use. .

People also make the mostly unfounded assumption that the eye candy in the 'aero' theme uses up resources but most of those resources are offloaded to the graphics card so it really has very little impact on system performance.

Most recent benchmarks show no significant FPS differential between XP and Vista, 32 or 64. 64 will give you more RAM and that's always good, probably helps load times.

Is it worth switching from XP? That's a close call - XP and Vista both get the job done about the same really so don't expect any big improvements.

Message quoted 1 times
------------------------------ tehhardpro wrote :


notherdude u have an old hand. Having an old hand doesnt make sence. Cuz its old. get a new one.. seems like ur hand doesnt understand what it is writing. So placve it in ur rig instead of vista human orgnoids will amke more sense
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tcsenter   10-27-2008 at 10:54:06 AM
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notherdude wrote :

Vista isn't really bloated - that's a myth - part of the reason that myth got started was the poor drivers and crapware loaded retail boxes and so on that plauged Vista before SP1 and also 'superfetch', Vista's very aggressive pre-caching which fills up RAM with frequently used code - it actually speeds things up but gives you the impression Vista is a RAM hog because system monitors will show a lot of RAM in use.

And the interesting thing is that perceptions about Vista being a 'memory hog' are largely fueled by erroneous interpretations of memory accounting in both Windows XP and Vista. In essence, Windows XP lies about memory usage.

Well, it isn't quite correct to imply there is some deception going on. Microsoft's documentation adequately explains the accounting system used in Windows XP to report memory usage, it just so happened that a lot of people were not aware of it. So Microsoft introduced an accounting change in Vista to make memory reporting more clear and less confusing than Windows XP.

Many users look at memory reported as "available" by XP and erroneously interpret this to mean "free" memory. So an XP user with 1GB RAM might frequently see "available" memory around 400MB, which they take to mean "free", then are shocked when they see only 10MB reported as "free" on a comparable or identical system running Vista. The problem is that, XP's definition of "available" is very different from Vista's definition of "free". They cannot be compared, yet this is in fact what many people are looking at.

Vista counts memory pages on the stand-by list against the amount of physical memory reported as "free" by Task Manager. Windows XP includes memory pages on the stand-by list in the amount of physical memory reported as "available" by Task Manager. IOW, Vista defines "free" as most people might expect; not committed or utilized for any purpose and is available for use on-demand. Windows XP defines "available" as most people might not expect; free memory as defined by Vista, in addition to memory utilized for other things but can be freed (i.e. zeroed and scrubbed) very quickly with little to no paging.

Most people would not expect 'free' to mean "well technically it is being used for other stuff, but its nothing important and we can free that memory really fast if something else needs it!" Vista really means "free" where it reports "free". If XP used the same terms and definitions as Vista, it would make Windows XP suddenly look much worse than most people thought while making Vista look not as bad in comparison.

Vista does report "available" memory using a definition that is highly similar to Windows XP, though not exactly the same, it is roughly comparable. Open System Information (msinfo32) and it will be included in System Summary, available physical memory, as shown in the following screen grab:

http://s89934018.onlinehome.us/images/sysinfo.png

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