Thread: Review: Windows Vista as an OS choice?

Originally Posted by Silentbob343

why would the GPU be tied up with the OS when playing a game?

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Originally Posted by Splash-X

The systems we've demoed are just standard computers and laptops, no dual cores. The MAIN thing Vista needs is the graphics card because it uses this for the majority of the processing which helps reduce the minimum specs.It isn't going to be like XP where everything is done on the CPU side for the graphics.

Vista requires a video card with at least 64mb of RAM dedicated to it (onboard works as long as it shares 64mb of ram).


This is why people are so quick to bash new OSs. I understand you may have installed a RC of Vista but unless you are given a full demo of the OS you wont understand all of its improvements and features.

For example, I bet you didn't know about the Low I/O "priority" given to tasks in Vista for performance. That is why the new search in Vista excells far past anything we've seen to date. The indexer runs as a Low I/O process (along with anti-virus software) so you can continue your tasks without these programs bogging down your work. They resume their load when you are no longer needing your CPU.


There are tons of features that make Vista the best OS to date but again, without seeing it in action (like a tech seminar) you wont know about most of them because they get lost in reviews and such.

Originally Posted by Splash-X

................Hell, why not use Windows ME..........

to the infinitieth power!!!!

Peace,

Rafster

I just figured that if your video card has some of its memory filled with fancy icons, graphics, shadows, 3d windows, etc, then wouldn't that leave less video memory available to your game?

I'm running x64 and XP, and in both OS's I can see a noticeable difference in graphics when I kill as many processes as possible, leaving only the 'necessary' few. It always seems to make my mouse react quicker and the video smoother. I guess that's CPU power not Graphics related though.

Am I not understanding the way the OS uses the video card? Does windows 'unload' itself from the video card when you start your game? Is that why alt-tabbing out of a game sometimes takes a while... then sometimes the game wont run good afterwards?

educate me!

I don't know exactly how Windows works with games and shifting of memory.
But Vista has a feature (From what i've read) which basically shuts down all uneeded services and functions of Windows when you run a game. This is to allow the game to get the most out of your machine.

I am using a Laptop with 1Ghz Pentium 3m and 512 Mb and windows XP Pro. It works like a charm. Just for kicks I installed Vista on it... big mistake... the computer became soooo sloooow that I took the Vista out right away and reformated with XP... it would take 10 minutes to boot... I guess you need a very good system to run vista... And I guess and hope that the final version will be more optimized...

Well, a P3 would seem rather on the low side but it isn't the processor its also the GPU. Like I've said before, Vista relies alot on the graphics card. Since your using a laptop and it seems older it may be that your graphics card is what is causing the slowness.

You'll also have to remember that there isn't alot of driver support YET for Vista. New hardware will have the drivers for it but older hardware really depends on the manufacturers to come up with new drivers.

Originally Posted by Garmac

I am using a Laptop with 1Ghz Pentium 3m and 512 Mb and windows XP Pro. It works like a charm. Just for kicks I installed Vista on it... big mistake... the computer became soooo sloooow that I took the Vista out right away and reformated with XP... it would take 10 minutes to boot... I guess you need a very good system to run vista... And I guess and hope that the final version will be more optimized...

and which version did you install? the torrent file you downloaded or an actual release?

I really don't think that this is a smart conclusion to jump to based on your experience.

Build 5381 from earlier this month (Official Beta 2 is 5384) worked ok on my aOpen miniPC. (Pentium M 1.6,512MB).

I didn't have any of the Aero features as the drivers weren't WDDM. To be honest with you I didn't see any improvement in terms of hibernation speed - though this was subjective as I didn't run any timed tests. Boot was pretty fast - no real complaints there.

The voice recognition was very nice - navigating web pages and windows in general was easy. The 'Show Numbers' feature is great in that it quickly assigns a # to any 'clickable' button/link and lets you say the number to click it - though you can of course just read the links on the page and it will select the first that it finds.

Correcting dictation text was very intuitive to, you could say "Select last two sentences" or correct {misrecognized word} and it would show you a list of alernatives that you could select just by saying it's number. I haven't use VIAVoice or Dragon much so I'm not sure how much it differs from those. It is an improvement over the 6.1 engine from Office 2003 though.

I'm hoping they have the some of same speech recognition improvements available stand alone in Office 2007 so you could use 'em with XP,etc.

I didn't try it with FP or IGuidance yet - though as soon as I can I will try it with the official CPP Beta 2 release. Not sure if it can compete with NaviVoice there though.

For me I saw one major and one minor drawback.

Minor - Vista swallowed 7GB of my 60GB HD just after clean install! Granted I'm sure it could be trimmed down quite a bit for CarPC applications so I can see future releases of Vista Lite, etc. Also, HD is easily upgradable..

Major - my biggest concern is the inability to use the native 800x480 I now have set up with the Intel Embedded drivers ... This probalby wouldn't be an issue for those whose cards are upgradable or already support custom res.

For desktop use: booting back into WinXP w/out Aero,etc made it seem 'empty' sort of like how it felt when I booted back into WinXP from MacOS.

If not on my CarPC, I will definately be testing the Beta 2 w/ all it's features on my desktop in the near future.