Windows Vista

[Gray-Catchpole]

Hi all

 

would be interesting to see what you all think of the new OS, what are your experiences, heres mine so far.bear in mind ive only had a couple of hours a night over the last week to mess with it.

 

Ive beed road testing windows vista ultimate, its a great OS i really like it, it seems light and not clunky at all, it all runs seamlessly, the aero them is great, it has a glass like effect on overlaping windows, looks very graphically intensive, but, it uses your graphics card to run the whole thing, so there is no degregation when your working, infact it uses less resourses than setting it back to windows classic, as that runs using your memory and cpu, it sounds strange but it work really well. when you minimise a window and mouse over it, you get a mini preview of that particular item, if you are watching a video it even shows this playing in the preview, you get the same effet using Alt and TAB, pressing the windows key and Tab will give you a roledex type effect of all open windows and folders, this looks great but a bit gimiky.

 

one thing that alarmed me about vista was i noticed all my memory was being used, by the system even when i wasnt doing anything, so i did a bit of hunting and found out that vista does this on pupose, its a form of prefetch, it predicts(based on how you use your machine) what you are going to do, and stores this in memory, and helps load programes faster and that sort of thing, but as soon as you need the memory it gives it back, no questions, this combined with the new hard drive cache, is now called now called superfetch, and it really does seem to hold it all together well.

 

there is also another type of cache, this is called Readyboost, this is a great one, it uses a usb memory stick as a super fast cache, you plug your usb stick in and windows does a check on it, and if its fast enough, it offers you the option to use the stick to speed up your system, a window will open and you can allocate some or all of the memory on the stick to be used, at the botoom is a windows recomended amount depending on the space available, but generally this should be 1-1.5 the amount of physical ram you have, this is a really great thing, ive cut down photoshop startup from 17 seconds to 4 seconds, word from 6 to 2 andso on. microsoft say if you have more than 2 gig of ram you wont see much benifit from this method, but time will tell

 

searching is almost instant, using indexing, loads of other good stuff, but they are some of the big good bits.

 

well thats the bits i do like, now for a few anoying bits, my soundcard(creative SB 5.1) dosent work using its own drivers, i have to install its own drivers, then install KX drivers over the top,thats not really vista`s fault, creative have stopped supporting the card(for vista anyway).

 

The other thing is most definetly Microsofts fault, on xp, i could run two monitors using two drivers, i have an ATI agp card and an Nvidia pci card, no problem on xp, but, microsoft have decided that running two graphic drivers in vista causes to many compatabilty problems, luckily my ATI card also has a DVI out, so after trawling ebay i manages to find a DVI to RGB adapter, only cos a £3, but now im sharing 256 meg and a single gpu on two monitors, it seems to run fine but, its very anoying.

 

but, i really do like vista, honest.

 

more to follow i expect.

[Newt]

Nice report Gray.

 

I haven't messed with it yet. I wait until SP1 before even trying a new OS unless I happen to be helping beta the thing (did that with XP).

 

Did you load Vista on exsiting hardware? I have read that it can be a major resource hog although it was interesting that it runs better with the new graphics layout than in 'classic' mode.

 

What are the specs on your video card?

[Gaffer]

When I first got this new comp 4 weeks ago I hated Vista, but now, I hate it even more!

 

I've had so many problems getting things to work on it as many of the usual programs I use aren't Vista ready. Nearly every day I come across a bug in the system, and I've lost all confidence in it. Bring back XP!!

 

Garth.

[Gray-Catchpole]

i must be really lucky, apart from the initial problems i mentioned above ive had no problems with any other hardware at all, i loaded on existing hardware Newt, my graphics card is a Radeon 9600 256meg ddr 400 MHz AGP x 8, HDTV Encoder, TwinView Architecture, Video Capture Interface Type: Video - 15 pin High-Density D-shell (VGA), Video - 4 pin mini-DIN (S-Video), Video - Coax, Video - RCA Composite Video, a nice, very cheap card.

 

Gaffer, what software are you having problems with.

[RobStubbs]

I'm looking at replacing my PC and the new one will have vista on it. I'm going to leave it a few months or more though to see how it settles down and (hopefully) the majority of the bugs are ironed out. There still seem to be a lot of reports of large scale incompatabilities and I'd rather not have to try and bug fix loads of stuff.

 

Rob.

[Tony U]

Just started using Vista at the weekend and nothing to report yet, apart from that MS Fortress or whatever its called is getting on my nerves when installing programmes.

 

Tony

Edited April 24, 2007 by Tony U

[Newt]

my graphics card is a Radeon 9600 256meg ddr 400 MHz AGP-8

 

Good to know Gray. That is decent specs for a video board and may well account for your performance. 256Mb and AGP-8 is good video performance even if the card wasn't that expensive.

[Gray-Catchpole]

Just started using Vista at the weekend and niothing to report yet, apart from that MS Fortress or whatever its called is getting on my nerves when installing programmes.

 

Tony

 

Hi tony,

i think you are on about User Account Control, it can get anoying, but its good security, if you want to turn this off, go to Start>Control Panel>User Accounts and family safety(the green text part)>User Accounts, and at the bottom click "Turn User Account Control On or Off" you wil then see a tick box, untick it, click ok and you will have a popup free system.

 

if you are in Classic veiw this would be,Start>control panel>user accounts, and at the bottom click "Turn User Account Control On or Off" you wil then see a tick box, untick it, click ok and you will have a popup free system.

 

it might not seem to make sence to have this turned on, while running as admin, but if you have individual user accounts, and you should have even for yourself, its a great way of stopping folk installing programes without permition, and at worst, really messing your machine up, by allowing nasty access from "the other side".

 

hope this helps.

 

 

 

Good to know Gray. That is decent specs for a video board and may well account for your performance. 256Mb and AGP-8 is good video performance even if the card wasn't that expensive.

 

Newt

a couple of days before i got my DVI-RGB adapter, i tried two nvidia geforce 2 cards with 64 meg each, and vista ran as smooth as silk, really surprised me, i would have left it at that but i was borrowing one the cards from my sons machine just to see if it would run. im not saying microsoft has got everything spot on, but vista is really growing on me fast, alot faster than xp did anyway.

Edited April 24, 2007 by Gray-Catchpole

[Andy_1984]

Nice report Gray.

 

I haven't messed with it yet. I wait until SP1 before even trying a new OS unless I happen to be helping beta the thing (did that with XP).

 

Did you load Vista on exsiting hardware? I have read that it can be a major resource hog although it was interesting that it runs better with the new graphics layout than in 'classic' mode.

 

What are the specs on your video card?

 

i dont think its a huge resource hogger like alot make out, i watched the gadget show few weeks back were the old guy installed it on his family pc, at first it took for ever to load but it was just that initial load that took ages every other time it was fine. i believe there was a load of hype over this more so from hardware manufacturers rather than MS itsself just to sell more expensive un needed hardware

[Gray-Catchpole]

i dont think its a huge resource hogger like alot make out, i watched the gadget show few weeks back were the old guy installed it on his family pc, at first it took for ever to load but it was just that initial load that took ages every other time it was fine. i believe there was a load of hype over this more so from hardware manufacturers rather than MS itsself just to sell more expensive un needed hardware

 

Your right Andy

like i said in my initial post its a form of prefetch, it predicts(based on how you use your machine) what you are going to do, and stores this in available memory, and helps load programes faster and that sort of thing, but as soon as you need the memory it gives it back, no questions, this combined with the new hard drive cache, is now called now called superfetch, and it really does seem to hold it all together well.