Windows Vista
I remember saying on SGN that I won’t try Vista out until Microsoft, nvidia, or the makers of STALKER and Gothic 3 release fixes that make those games compatible with Vista. But then I realised that I haven’t played either of them in quite a while, especially Gothic 3.
So I thought to myself, hey why not try out Windows Vista, you have an hour or two to spare today to install it, and have been looking for an excuse to re-install your main OS for quite a while on your gaming rig anyway. So I did, and my first impressions of Vista can be summed up by the following two words, flashy and annoying.
Flashy is quite straightforward, Vista’s Aero interface is very flashy, and shiny. It reminds me a lot of Mac OS X, basically a very cute/pretty pastel(in Mac OS X’s case it’s white) coloured interface with lots of round corners and transparency. At first it seems quite the overkill but one gets used to it quite quickly and then it seems nice. I just wonder how much longer it will be till I start finding it to be annoying and useless.
Now to the annoying bit. I’m a power user, emphasis on the power bit, I like to turn things upside down in my main gaming OS. I use shell commands, clean up services, edit the registry by hand, and a lot other things, and this is where Vista really gets in the way. “Do you want to continue” pops up just about every step that I make, luckily that can be turned off somewhat, but even after turning it off I run into it.
Overall, I think that Microsoft is actually going into the right direction with Vista, making it even more accessible and usable for the average Joe user. Not to say that there aren’t enough improvements for the power users.
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I think vista is not a bad OS, it’s good a pretty good interface, if not a rip off OS X. I don’t know what features the other versions of Vista offer, but Vista Ultimate by far has the most security features in it. Not to mention UAC, which can be very annoying at times. Firstly if your not an experienced user, vista will not let you edit some of the windows files. The UAC will constantly block you from doing so, secondly you need to go through a 100 options before you disable the right one.
Secondly if your pc is a few years old, you’ll probably have a hard time finding proper drivers for you hardware. In my case, i am using third party drivers to run my Creative sound card. Even though creative have stopped updating drivers for my particular 5.1 surround sound card.
Overall I’d say it’s not a bad operating system, but people who don’t know what’s going on will have to struggle with vista. Especially if your switching from XP to Vista.
One more thing, Vista does have one pretty cool feature worth noting. It has the option where you can choose to use your external portable drive, as extra RAM. I don’t know how much this will help in the overall performance of the sytem, but it should give ther user a few percent of boost.
There are actually two features which relate to this, ReadyBoost is the one you mentioned whereby you use an USB2.0 memory stick to making disk seeking/caching quicker. Note that it’s not used as extra RAM, and is much slower than RAM anyway.
And the second feature is SuperFetch which loads frequently used programs into this ReadyBoost cache, so that applications start up much quicker.
Though from what I have read, if you have 1gb ram or more, the gains aren’t that great really. And also it won’t make your games run faster, which is a bummer really.
Yeah, I have actually heard something similar like that aswell. Stating that you don’t gain much from 1GB+ ram. The other interesting thing which I noticed is that, when installing the OS; the minimum specs for vista is around ~14gb. When I installed Vista, it took a total of ~45mins, and took up around 8gb of space.
I’m not sure any more how much my installation takes up, but that sounds about right. I figure the rest of the space is for the temporary files and the page file.
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