VISTA switch over

[Zoobecca]

I did a search through the forums and didn't find what I was looking for. For anyone who has made the switch from XP to VISTA  would you reccomend this change? What, if any, where the problems you had to deal with? Through a campus agreement I purchased VISTA and was going to install it. I need to keep up with what is happening on campus so I can assist students with questions. However since EQ II is what I spend most of my time with on my computer I wanted to see what you think. Should I make the jump or hold off. My system specs are easily within the requirements to run the OS. Zoo

[Korpo]

I run EQ2 on Vista on both my laptop and desktop, and both work fine. The only thing I'd recommend is to make sure you have a bit more RAM than you would need on XP. My desktop only had 2Gb, and EQ2 performed <b>much</b> better once I upgraded it to 4Gb.

[Zoobecca]

I just upgraded from 1GB to 2GB. I need to reformat soon and thought it might be time to install VISTA. I thought I had seen a lot of issues with VISTA and EQ when it first came out.Zoo

[KefkaQ]

<cite>Zoobecca wrote:</cite><blockquote>I just upgraded from 1GB to 2GB. I need to reformat soon and thought it might be time to install VISTA. I thought I had seen a lot of issues with VISTA and EQ when it first came out.Zoo</blockquote>I upgraded to Vista on my main pc and my fiance's pc when we built her a new one and upgraded the proc and ram on mine. (mainly for DX10 in lotro XD And I have a good excuse in that I work tech support and actually USING Vista on a daily basis helps me there). I haven't had any problems that are specific to vista at all.

[Sassinak]

With Vista my EQ2 installation stopped working, but there was a quick fix:  I got out my original EQ2 discs and reinstalled the base game into the same directory.  When I ran this, it re-patched a few of the old files, and then launched successfully!  All of the expansions were already present, and didn't need to be reinstalled.

[Phaine]

Vista takes more resources and has worse performance than XP.Vista is newer and thus harder to tweak and get support for.Vista is getting patched, and thus often buggy.I just recently reformated to try vista again for the SP1 update and because a friend who recommended it for multiboxing ( DIE TIKO! DIE!) After about 2 weeks of playing around with it I chose to go back to XP. Im a boxer, and need every small amount of performance I can get from my pc, and its a fact that at the current time XP out performs Vista.However, if your willing to spend extra time, surf the web for tweaks and fixes, and dont mind changing things here and there to get things to work its not a horrible operating system...its just not for me.My system specs.AMD 4200 dual core4 gigs of DDR2 800Geforce 8800 GTS 640 meg cardSimply reverting to xp increased my frame rate in game by 25fps.

[Webin]

The worry is unneeded.  It sounds like you are in some sort of computer support position on a school campus.  This tells me that you are more than capable of handling anything that might come up.  I had Vista up and running the day it went retail, and had EQ running the next day (I did a clean install of the OS and had to repatch my entire EQ directory).  There were a few performance issues with EQ at the beginning, mostly related to the video drivers.  These days, everything is fine, and I have no significant issues with Vista or Everquest.  I've also been using 4gigs (which is recognized as 3-3.5gigs) for the last several years, so I can't attest to performance on machines with less.Vista is the most modern version of Windows.  It's not going anywhere and there's no real problems for the average user to worry about.  The only reason NOT to upgrade is if you are running a marginal system.  Here is the Microsoft page listing recommended (minumum) requirements: <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pr...quirements.mspx</a>

[Korpo]

<cite>Webin@Befallen wrote:</cite><blockquote>I've also been using 4gigs (which is recognized as 3-3.5gigs) for the last several years, so I can't attest to performance on machines with less.</blockquote>Install the 64-bit version of Vista and you will see all your RAM (assuming you have a 64-bit capable computer). Complicated and nerdy discussion about 32-bit vs. 64-bit architectures upon request, but the bottom line is that the 3-3.5Gb thing isn't Vista's fault.

[Phaine]

<cite>Webin@Befallen wrote:</cite><blockquote>Vista is the most modern version of Windows.  It's not going anywhere and there's no real problems for the average user to worry about.  The only reason NOT to upgrade is if you are running a marginal system.  Here is the Microsoft page listing recommended (minumum) requirements: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx" target="_blank">http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pr...quirements.mspx</a></blockquote>Couple things here. First vista was way late on its release. Windows Vienna is well along in its dev cycle. Vista will be more like a windows ME than a new windows mainstream product, as Vienna will be out before they fix it.As stated earlier the main reason not to upgrade is if you wish to have higher performance (I.E. Higher Frame Rates in games.) Yes you can get systems that will make it more or less unnoticeable, but even on my highend system a 25fps increase is rather noticeable.

[Webin]

<cite>Korpo wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite></cite>Install the 64-bit version of Vista and you will see all your RAM (assuming you have a 64-bit capable computer). Complicated and nerdy discussion about 32-bit vs. 64-bit architectures upon request, but the bottom line is that the 3-3.5Gb thing isn't Vista's fault.</blockquote>Yep, I know this.... I was actually considering going 64-bit the next time I wipe the gaming machine... I haven't tested it suffiently with a virtual machine, but have no reason to believe there'd be any issues.<cite>Tdktemplar@The Bazaar wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite></cite>First vista was way late on its release. Windows Vienna is well along in its dev cycle. Vista will be more like a windows ME than a new windows mainstream product, as Vienna will be out before they fix it.</blockquote>I owned WinME as well <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />   In fact, I've had every desktop version of windows since 3.1 (skipping 2000, NT4, etc).  The original poster stated that he already had a copy of Vista (I think) through an educational discount, and was wondering whether or not to install it.  Just because the next product will follow 3-4 years after the current product is no reason not to use the current product.  Someone who waits to upgrade because the next big thing is right around the corner will never upgrade.The bottom line is that Vista is nothing to be scared of.  There's nothing wrong with it (for the average user, and Everquest players).  No, it's not a perfect OS product, but there is no such thing.  You claim that your system experiences a performance degradation with Vista, and I claim that my system doesn't see any such issue.  Mileage varies.

[Korpo]

<cite>Webin@Befallen wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Korpo wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite></cite>Install the 64-bit version of Vista and you will see all your RAM (assuming you have a 64-bit capable computer). Complicated and nerdy discussion about 32-bit vs. 64-bit architectures upon request, but the bottom line is that the 3-3.5Gb thing isn't Vista's fault.</blockquote>Yep, I know this.... I was actually considering going 64-bit the next time I wipe the gaming machine... I haven't tested it suffiently with a virtual machine, but have no reason to believe there'd be any issues.<cite></cite></blockquote>Both of my machines are 64-bit, and the only problems I see are with weird old hardware that doesn't have proper drivers: my USB to RS232 adapter, my Xbox memory card reader thing, and my ancient scanner. None of them are really supported by the manufacturers anymore, but I haven't gotten around to replacing them because the once a year I used each of them doesn't warrant it.

[convict]

<cite>Tdktemplar@The Bazaar wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Webin@Befallen wrote:</cite><blockquote>Vista is the most modern version of Windows.  It's not going anywhere and there's no real problems for the average user to worry about.  The only reason NOT to upgrade is if you are running a marginal system.  Here is the Microsoft page listing recommended (minumum) requirements: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx" target="_blank">http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pr...quirements.mspx</a></blockquote>Couple things here. First vista was way late on its release. Windows Vienna is well along in its dev cycle. Vista will be more like a windows ME than a new windows mainstream product, as Vienna will be out before they fix it.As stated earlier the main reason not to upgrade is if you wish to have higher performance (I.E. Higher Frame Rates in games.) Yes you can get systems that will make it more or less unnoticeable, but even on my highend system a 25fps increase is rather noticeable.</blockquote>I see you say a new Windows will be out before "they fix it" I would assume you mean fix Vista.. Vista runs flawlessly for me, and seems I'm not the only one.. Because some people cannot get something to work the way they want, does not mean it's broke. My machine runs eq2 with no problems,photoshop,3dsm,carrara,nero, etc with not 1 problem what so ever.

[Phaine]

<cite>Webin@Befallen wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Korpo wrote:</cite>The bottom line is that Vista is nothing to be scared of.  There's nothing wrong with it (for the average user, and Everquest players).  No, it's not a perfect OS product, but there is no such thing.  You claim that your system experiences a performance degradation with Vista, and I claim that my system doesn't see any such issue.  Mileage varies.</blockquote>Your welcome to claim you see no performance degredation... however all of the benchmarks have shown differently. I will trust people who benchmark for a living, and my own personal experience in tech support and at home on my internal network,rather than someone on the EQ2 forums.Do a few google searches of benchmarks of vista vs xp... its pretty unanimous.<cite>convict wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite></cite>I see you say a new Windows will be out before "they fix it" I would assume you mean fix Vista.. Vista runs flawlessly for me, and seems I'm not the only one.. Because some people cannot get something to work the way they want, does not mean it's broke. My machine runs eq2 with no problems,photoshop,3dsm,carrara,nero, etc with not 1 problem what so ever. </blockquote>I never said that vista cant be run with out problems, I said for gaming purposes there is a performance hit. SP1 was supposed to fix the performance issues for vista, however benchmarks have shown that it has given a minimal if any performance increase. However SP3 for XP that was supposed to give no performance increase has shown increases of up to 20 - 30 % in benchmarks. Its not that I cant get vista to run... vista ran fine for me. However, as a gamer I like performance, and vista isnt worth the performance hit in my personal opinion.

[Deathma]

<p>Some good reading about Vista vs. XP</p><p><a href="http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/143608-3/test_results_does_sp1_fix_vista.html" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/businesscent..._fix_vista.html</a></p>

[Wingrider01]

<cite>Tdktemplar@The Bazaar wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Webin@Befallen wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Korpo wrote:</cite>The bottom line is that Vista is nothing to be scared of.  There's nothing wrong with it (for the average user, and Everquest players).  No, it's not a perfect OS product, but there is no such thing.  You claim that your system experiences a performance degradation with Vista, and I claim that my system doesn't see any such issue.  Mileage varies.</blockquote>Your welcome to claim you see no performance degredation... however all of the benchmarks have shown differently. I will trust people who benchmark for a living, and my own personal experience in tech support and at home on my internal network,rather than someone on the EQ2 forums.Do a few google searches of benchmarks of vista vs xp... its pretty unanimous.<cite>convict wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite></cite>I see you say a new Windows will be out before "they fix it" I would assume you mean fix Vista.. Vista runs flawlessly for me, and seems I'm not the only one.. Because some people cannot get something to work the way they want, does not mean it's broke. My machine runs eq2 with no problems,photoshop,3dsm,carrara,nero, etc with not 1 problem what so ever. </blockquote>I never said that vista cant be run with out problems, I said for gaming purposes there is a performance hit. SP1 was supposed to fix the performance issues for vista, however benchmarks have shown that it has given a minimal if any performance increase.However SP3 for XP that was supposed to give no performance increase has shown increases of up to 20 - 30 % in benchmarks.Its not that I cant get vista to run... vista ran fine for me. However, as a gamer I like performance, and vista isnt worth the performance hit in my personal opinion.</blockquote><p>Funny - the newer reviews don;t seem to support this theory. Neither does my personal expierence in running Vista gold drop from November of 07 or the various non-public beta drops that I used prior to the general releasse of the candidate to the public. The recent release of SP1 has increased the stablity, security and performance of Vista 100 fold. As you say - this comes from personal expierence with 300 installations of Vista Ultimate 32 and 64 bit at my company where we do support/security for hire contracting and from personal expierence on my home networks.</p><p>Unlike you - I tend to take those people that "do benchmarking for a living" with a large grain of salt for a number of reasons, </p><p>1. they tend to throw the OS on the system, and not give it time to settle in, this is critical with the way Vista handles the storage, have seen a 4 percent increase if system performance from day of install to 30-45 days later</p><p>2. they tend to let their grudges of various hardware platforms, OS's and applications show through - you can pretty much mimic a review of a Nvidia card by someone thaqt is a self professed ATI users.</p><p>3. they tend to slate their review to benefit who ever is giving them the biggest paycheck for that issue.</p><p>4. with the upgrade cycle of drivers, OS patches and hardwares, the self professed benchmarks are normally out of date with in 30 days of thier being published, but people tend to "quote" links to benchmarks that are over a year old, or in a lot of cases longer then that. </p><p>Again, as you mentioned, you are welcome to claim that you do see a performance hit on the vista box for gaming, will continue to multibox on my Vista ultimate boxes with no apprarent drop in performance. Early performance issues with Vista tended to be driver related, and if you decide to look back far enough to the early reviews and "benchmarks" of XP, you will find the exact same comments concerning performance for XP as you do Vista.</p>

[DngrMou]

<cite>Zoobecca wrote:</cite><blockquote>I did a search through the forums and didn't find what I was looking for. For anyone who has made the switch from XP to VISTA  would you reccomend this change? What, if any, where the problems you had to deal with? Through a campus agreement I purchased VISTA and was going to install it. I need to keep up with what is happening on campus so I can assist students with questions. However since EQ II is what I spend most of my time with on my computer I wanted to see what you think. Should I make the jump or hold off. My system specs are easily within the requirements to run the OS. Zoo</blockquote>Switching to Vista gets you nothing, and could cause you a lot of problems.  (EQ2 wise)  If you have to have it for other things, consider a dual boot system.  I've done that, it works well, (just make sure you install each OS on it's own partition).

[Birn]

Disable UAC and maybe get some RAM and vista is just fine. <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY<img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />" /> I personally wont even consider switching back to XP, with more and more 64 bit applications (like 3D, video rendering) it's simply amazing. And DX10 is pretty darn cool <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY<img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />" />And oh, back on topic, running EQ2 with Vista is not a problem anymore at least not on the three machines I recently installed EQ2 on.

[lstead]

I recently had to reinstall my system and since i had access to the disks to install Vista with SP1 included, I decided to give it a try. I had crashing problems with the ICH9 driver for my motherboard--Vista helpfully sent me to upgrade to the exact driver I had installed. I found that games ran significantly slower. I also play LOTRO and wanted to see the DX10 eye candy, in the end to make the game playable, I had to turn off DX10 and turn the settings lower than what I had in XP! EQ2 was similar, ran noticeably slower, though I didn't have to turn quite as much down.

[Mayl]

Can we maybe more this to the correct forum?

[convict]

<cite>Kathy@Antonia Bayle wrote:</cite><blockquote>I recently had to reinstall my system and since i had access to the disks to install Vista with SP1 included, I decided to give it a try. I had crashing problems with the ICH9 driver for my motherboard--Vista helpfully sent me to upgrade to the exact driver I had installed. I found that games ran significantly slower. I also play LOTRO and wanted to see the DX10 eye candy, in the end to make the game playable, I had to turn off DX10 and turn the settings lower than what I had in XP! EQ2 was similar, ran noticeably slower, though I didn't have to turn quite as much down.</blockquote>What specs do you have?

[Gilasil]

<p>I've been running on Vista on my laptop for a few weeks now and it runs great.  At least as good as my XP desktop.</p><p> A few things:</p><p> 1.  You MUST have SP1 installed.  At least for me EQ2 wouldn't run without it.  SP1 is on automatic updates now so if your current on your updates you're probably fine.  Also, at least for me SP1 shaved several hundred megabytes off Vista's memory requirements.  It still takes more then XP but the discrepancy isn't nearly as bad.  (I think I'm at 500 MB on boot up which includes all the extra crap but no applications.)</p><p> 2.  I turned off the aeroglass shell (actually did that months ago for other reasons).  It appears to use around 100 MB which I figured could be put to use better elsewhere.  My system looks like Windows 2000 now but it's really Vista.  I also turned off some other stuff I wasn't using at the same time.</p><p> 3.  As with XP, the virus scanner can be a real pain.  No better no worse.  I'm about to try something else there.</p><p> 4.  Take advantage of the new OS to get a cool DX10 card (optional of course).  </p><p> I'm using Home Premium 32 bit.  System has 2 GB memory and seems fine with that.</p>

[Jehannum]

<p>Few things...</p><p>1. Definitely disable the User Account Protection/Control (UAP/UAC) - it's a serious annoyance to continually be required to vouch for the software you're running.</p><p>2. If you run voice chat programs, ensure that you set them up to <b>run as administrator</b> once you make the switch to Vista (or tell it <b>all</b> files run as admin).  Otherwise, EQ2 will take device priority away from them and prevent you from speaking while the game's in the foreground.</p><p>3. I've had no Vista-specific issues since switching; however I built this PC to run Vista so I don't have previous benchmarks for a speed comparison.</p><p>Edit - Microsoft and their (*&#%^ ever-changing acronyms...</p>

[Arkinon]

<p><span style="color: #ffffff;">Gamers have complained that Vista hampers game play, and our tests confirm that XP is substantially faster than either Vista version on games. SP1 had almost no gain over original Vista. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #ffffff;">In frame-rate tests on the desktop PC, XP bested both versions of Vista every time. On the Doom 3 tests, antialiasing usually had a slightly negative effect on Vista's performance, but antialiasing scarcely made a difference to XP. In the desktop Doom 3 tests without antialiasing, XP's frame rate was about 14 percent faster than that of second-place SP1; with antialiasing turned on, XP's frame rate was about 14 percent faster than that of second-place Vista. In the Far Cry tests, Vista and Vista with SP1 improved a bit with antialiasing turned on. Antialiasing degraded XP's performance on the Far Cry test, though XP still won handily on every test. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #ffffff;">Our test laptop wasn't built for gaming. XP, Vista, and SP1 fared about the same; SP1 and Vista bested XP in Doom 3 and matched XP in Far Cry. But the frame-rate counts were very low for all three, ranging from 2 to 7 fps with antialiasing and 10 to 25 fps without. </span></p> <p><span style="color: #ffffff;">As these tests show, graphics performance depends greatly on hardware and on the OS. So how do you know whether your current (or next) PC's graphics card is up to snuff? </span></p>And this is why I have gone back to XP even though I have 4 gigs of ram. I will prob buy XP 64 version to utilize all 4 gigs.... otherwise im waiting till 2010 when the new OS is scheduled to come out.

[Sevlar]

<cite>Tdktemplar@The Bazaar wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Webin@Befallen wrote:</cite><blockquote><cite>Korpo wrote:</cite>The bottom line is that Vista is nothing to be scared of.  There's nothing wrong with it (for the average user, and Everquest players).  No, it's not a perfect OS product, but there is no such thing.  You claim that your system experiences a performance degradation with Vista, and I claim that my system doesn't see any such issue.  Mileage varies.</blockquote>Your welcome to claim you see no performance degredation... however all of the benchmarks have shown differently. I will trust people who benchmark for a living, and my own personal experience in tech support and at home on my internal network,rather than someone on the EQ2 forums.Do a few google searches of benchmarks of vista vs xp... its pretty unanimous.</blockquote><p>If you notice almost all of the Vista benchmarks that are listed online are based on January / February of 07 which is less than a month before or after Vista's release. Also consider during that time almost all of the drivers for the devices tested with those benchmarks were beta versions of the drivers since none of the manufactures wrote the drivers for vista until after its release (more on that later in this post).</p><p>Name one game or any software that runs flawless at release. Fact is Vista is headed into a year and a half old and it is running much much better than it did right after release and in reality XP was in much worse shape when it was released than Vista ever was. In fact XP was really unstable until the release of Service Pack 2 (Which in itself bombed many PC's when it was first released). </p><p>Almost any MMO is supper laggy upon its release. It takes several patches and client tweeks to get the program to run more smoothly and considering how much more complicated an OS is you can't expect Vista to be any different. </p><p>Also its a fact that according to benchmarks each version of windows ran slower than its previous version. So by your logic we should be running windows 95 or 3.1 since its benchmark testing was faster than Windows 98. </p><p>I work in PC sales and repair and I have to deal with the Vista bias all the time. I am certianly not a Micro$oft fanboi but I can say that most complaints that people have about Vista are either based of of pure ignorance or is related to a device that was built by another company.</p><p>I had one customer stand in my shop and go on forever about how Vista sucked. When I asked him what his primary complaint was he mentioned that he paid over $1000 for an HP color laser printer and now it wasn't supported by Vista. I informed him that it was not Micro$oft's job to write drivers for every device built. It was HP that decided to not provide support for the latest Operating System on a printer that was only a little over a year old and worth $1000. But as always it's easier for people who don't understand PC's and how they work to simply blame Micro$oft instead of recognising what the real problem is.</p><p>All device & software manufacturers held off writing Vista drivers / patches for their products until after Vista was released. It made more sense for them to wait for the product to be completed because there was always a chance that Micro$oft might have to make a major change while Vista was still in beta which would force the companies to rewrite their drivers and patches over again thus wasting time, resources and most importantly money.</p><p>As a result of this tactic there was about a 3-6 month period where there were still alot of products on store shelves that where not Vista ready. Those few devices that were Vista ready where running on drivers that were rushed out the door to get onto store shevles. Often these drivers caused devices to run a little buggy until a few updates later(Note these are the conditions in which most of the Vista benchmarks were tested and as such do not reflect the performance level of Vista in the state its in today) .  Now after well over a year beyond Vista's release you will be hard pressed to find any new item on store shelves not made to work with Vista. </p><p>Windows XP was no different. I remember when it was released almost everyone's Roxio or Adaptec or even Nero burning software for their CD-rw's would not work with XP. On top of that none of the CD-RW manufacturer's would provide you with updated software. They instead offered to SELL the software to make your device work again. A whole slew of Printers, Scanners and other devices no longer were supported. Up until XP there was never an Operating System released that forced so much product to be suddenly obsolete. After a year though and even more so after SP2 for XP was released we found that many itmes that didn't work before were suddenly working with XP. I had games for windows 98 / 95 that would no longer work on XP but after SP2 suddenly those game sinstalled and worked fine.</p><p>Already here we are finding products that didn't work with vista before and working fine now.</p><p>After over a year of Selling Vista PC's I have not had one customer tell me they regretted buying a Vista computer. The reason is because before my customer's make a purchase I ask them what hardware and software are they currently using on their old PC that they intend to use on the new PC. I then research to see if those devices or programs work with Vista or not. By the time my customer is ready to buy they know exactly what to expect and do not get any suprises.</p><p>Compare this to John Q. Public who goes to Walmart to buy that cheap emachine off the shelf and then takes that new computer home only to find that the printer or scanner they bought in 1998 doesn't work with the new system and then they proclaim that the new PC sucks and its becuase of Vista.</p><p>Bottom line is its not a good idea to upgrade an older PC to Vista. All to often to force a new OS on an older system is just asking for perfomance issues. With that in mind don't let the people who think they are technicians just becuase they built a couple gaming systems for themselves talk you out of the new thechnology because of some recent mass hysteria that is generated base mostly on ignorance or data that was provided before the first patches for the program even had a chance to be released.</p><p>Bench marks are not the end all be all to determine if one product is better. A benchmark is in no way a substitute for putting something to real use nad seeing how it holds up. I have sold well over a hundred or more Vista systems and my customers are happy and never have I had a PC brought back to me for repair or issues that were caused by Vista alone. Its not a bad product and it certainly is solid as far as stability goes. </p>

[flesyMeM]

<p>Much like Win2k was the stepping stone to WinXP (they are, at their core, very much the same thing in most ways) Vista is just the stepping stone to the next OS release in 2009/2010. If you don't have some pressing need to upgrade to Vista (such as wanting DX10 support) you won't really be missing out on much overall if you wait until the next version.</p><p>I only upgraded because I like learning and tooling around with something new. I've got Vista performing at least as well as XP with most things, better in some cases, and worse in some involving dated software (including a few games). If you have the hardware, you're willing to learn what to disable, what to uninstall, and what to tweak--Vista is just fine (now that driver support has caught up quite well). Pretty much exactly the same as it was upgrading to XP in '02-03... <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p><p>I do wonder though--do enough people actually sit around all day searching their HDD for files they saved last week or email from grandma to even justify the existence of Windows Search? Does anyone actually read every one of the constant UAC pop-ups before just clicking "yes" right through them, and if so do they retain anything that resembles sanity? Thankfully things like these are easily disabled altogether--increasing performance and reducing annoyance at the same time! <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /></p>

[Wingrider01]

<cite>Arkinon wrote:</cite><blockquote><p><span style="color: #ffffff;">Gamers have complained that Vista hampers game play, and our tests confirm that XP is substantially faster than either Vista version on games. SP1 had almost no gain over original Vista. </span></p><p><span style="color: #ffffff;">In frame-rate tests on the desktop PC, XP bested both versions of Vista every time. On the Doom 3 tests, antialiasing usually had a slightly negative effect on Vista's performance, but antialiasing scarcely made a difference to XP. In the desktop Doom 3 tests without antialiasing, XP's frame rate was about 14 percent faster than that of second-place SP1; with antialiasing turned on, XP's frame rate was about 14 percent faster than that of second-place Vista. In the Far Cry tests, Vista and Vista with SP1 improved a bit with antialiasing turned on. Antialiasing degraded XP's performance on the Far Cry test, though XP still won handily on every test. </span></p><p><span style="color: #ffffff;">Our test laptop wasn't built for gaming. XP, Vista, and SP1 fared about the same; SP1 and Vista bested XP in Doom 3 and matched XP in Far Cry. But the frame-rate counts were very low for all three, ranging from 2 to 7 fps with antialiasing and 10 to 25 fps without. </span></p><p><span style="color: #ffffff;">As these tests show, graphics performance depends greatly on hardware and on the OS. So how do you know whether your current (or next) PC's graphics card is up to snuff? </span></p>And this is why I have gone back to XP even though I have 4 gigs of ram. I will prob buy XP 64 version to utilize all 4 gigs.... otherwise im waiting till 2010 when the new OS is scheduled to come out.</blockquote><p>Can you supply links and date verification to the above comments.</p>

[Zoobecca]

Wow! I got a lot more input on my post then I had expected. Thanks for moving the post. I overlooked the technical help forum. After carefully reading everyone's posts and checking elsewhere I have decided to reformat and re-install XP. Game performance is very important to me and I think switching would be more of a headache then it is worth at this time. Maybe in a year when the campus is expected to go fully to VISTA. FYI. I got an email yesterday that was a petition being circulated about XP. People are demanding that MS not take XP off the market next year. Then will no longer be shipping it out on any of their systems. I also read that the UK school districts refuse to use anything but XP. That may be old news but to me it is still very relevant. Thanks for all the wonderful input.Zoobecca

[Webin]

<cite>Zoobecca wrote:</cite><blockquote>FYI. I got an email yesterday that was a petition being circulated about XP. People are demanding that MS not take XP off the market next year. Then will no longer be shipping it out on any of their systems. I also read that the UK school districts refuse to use anything but XP. That may be old news but to me it is still very relevant. </blockquote>Honestly, it's people gaining biases from external sources.  Vista has gotten a much harsher backlash than it deserves.  As someone who's been using it for something line 15 months now, I know that it's a decent operating system.  If Microsoft were to "continue" to sell and support XP, that increases operating costs, detracts development time from Vista, and slows the world's "technology advancement".  When I was growing up my schools taught typing on AppleIIe computers intead of the 486's that were modern at the time.  Organizations with limited budgets (like those UK schools and countless others) have always clung to old technology in an effort to reduce costs, but it ends up hampering the "cutting edge" experience people should be gaining.If you want to stay with XP SP2 on your computer for gaming that's your choice, but I'll repeat myself one last time (and then shut up).  Vista is not as bad as all these grumpy technophiles claim it to be.  In fact, I think it offers some wonderful enhancements to the computing experience.  The sidebar is my best friend.

[Phaine]

Again there is nothing wrong with vista other than the performance issues. I just uninstalled it last weekend and went from 15 - 25 fps with 4 clients in EQ2 to 25 - 45 fps in EQ2. I went from 40 - 45 fps in Cod4 to around 70.So to each his own... every benchmark I have seen agrees with my experiences. I never had issues with office related stuff and installs actually ran faster, so it doesnt surprise me that people dont have issues with it. For me personally... I want every ounce of performance out of my machine I can get... and at the current time, vista doesnt offer the highest performance.

[aardda]

<p>Well i have upgraded to a new comp and am now running vista (finally got the darn thing running today).</p><p>I have most settings turned up to maximum, with shadows options and flora turned off, and consistently run above 50fps.</p><p>My specs areamd x2 6000 (3ghz)4gb ram512mb ati 3800running vista 64 business edition</p>

[Wingrider01]

<cite>Zoobecca wrote:</cite><blockquote>Wow! I got a lot more input on my post then I had expected. Thanks for moving the post. I overlooked the technical help forum. After carefully reading everyone's posts and checking elsewhere I have decided to reformat and re-install XP. Game performance is very important to me and I think switching would be more of a headache then it is worth at this time. Maybe in a year when the campus is expected to go fully to VISTA. FYI. I got an email yesterday that was a petition being circulated about XP. People are demanding that MS not take XP off the market next year. Then will no longer be shipping it out on any of their systems. I also read that the UK school districts refuse to use anything but XP. That may be old news but to me it is still very relevant. Thanks for all the wonderful input.Zoobecca</blockquote>Seen that email, after due consideration and a detail review of it, I filed it in the appropriate location - lined the cat box with it,

[LordTuatha]

The smartest thing I have done when troubleshooting my problems with EQ2 and other programs was to get rid of Vista and reinstall XP.  Vista gave me nothing but headaches the entire time I used it (about 2 months).  From random BSOD's to problems with EAX enabled, and various stability issues.  Amazingly 90% of my problems went away when I put XP back on my machine.  Now whether that's because NVIDIA, Creative Labs and such are more familiar with XP when writing drivers, or because Vista is a PoS that never should have been released, is up for debate.  The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.  I will only say that if Microsoft had released a quality product they would quit extending the date of XP support stoppage. 

[Wingrider01]

<cite>LordTuatha wrote:</cite><blockquote>The smartest thing I have done when troubleshooting my problems with EQ2 and other programs was to get rid of Vista and reinstall XP.  Vista gave me nothing but headaches the entire time I used it (about 2 months).  From random BSOD's to problems with EAX enabled, and various stability issues.  Amazingly 90% of my problems went away when I put XP back on my machine.  Now whether that's because NVIDIA, Creative Labs and such are more familiar with XP when writing drivers, or because Vista is a PoS that never should have been released, is up for debate.  The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.  I will only say that if Microsoft had released a quality product they would quit extending the date of XP support stoppage.  </blockquote><p>BSOD's on a OS because of drivers are NOT the OS's fault - go back and look when XP was released, the same exact problem existed. Creative Labs drivers have been one of the worst in the industry for a long time, they tend to throw junk out and leave it. The are pushing their OpenAL junk to be accepted as a industry standard, that is what they are concetrating on in their drivers.</p><p> Stability of the OS with BSOD's are driver problems in 99 percent of the cases, junk drivers = junk stablity. Dumped Creative Labs sound devices back during the XP driver fiasco and have never looked back. On the production machines I play games on and use for business I have had 0 BSOD's in Vista since the production version was installed back in November 2007, on my two playground boxes I tend to BSOD them all the time, and in the research of the cause 95 percent of the cause is driver/hardware related. MS extended the security patch life cycle on Windows 98 but not the resale life cycle, if they do anything for XP it will be similiar. </p>

[bluefish]

<cite>Webin@Befallen wrote:</cite><blockquote>The worry is unneeded.  It sounds like you are in some sort of computer support position on a school campus.  This tells me that you are more than capable of handling anything that might come up.  I had Vista up and running the day it went retail, and had EQ running the next day (I did a clean install of the OS and had to repatch my entire EQ directory).  There were a few performance issues with EQ at the beginning, mostly related to the video drivers.  These days, everything is fine, and I have no significant issues with Vista or Everquest.  I've also been using 4gigs (which is recognized as 3-3.5gigs) for the last several years, so I can't attest to performance on machines with less.Vista is the most modern version of Windows.  It's not going anywhere and there's no real problems for the average user to worry about.  The only reason NOT to upgrade is if you are running a marginal system.  Here is the Microsoft page listing recommended (minumum) requirements: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/windowsvista/editions/systemrequirements.mspx" target="_blank">http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pr...quirements.mspx</a></blockquote>seems you had something wrong with your vista installation .. ( driver corruption maybe? or even an outdated driver?)I dual boot both XP SP3 and VistaSP1 and there is a less than noticable difference in fps ...even on raids my systems specs Asus P5B Deluxee6600 @ 3.6 Ghz 24/7 cooled with a scythe infinitysix (6) gigs Crucial Ballistix 800mhz 4-4-4-12-22 @2.15vNvidia Geforce 9800 GX2 - stock speeds 600/2000Antec 900 Antec Quattro 850 powering everythingVista 64 bit on a seagate barracuda 250GB Win XP 32 bit on a seagate barracuda 80GBthe only way I can actually tell a difference using XP vs Vista is when I benchmark and even then, the difference is very little.

[Beghauns]

<p>I didn't really find much of a difference running eq2 on xp vs vista 64.  Went a long while with a dual boot of them and using vista for fun while email and gaming on xp, but for the last 8 months i've been using vista full time and haven't gone back to xp except for a few tools.  Will say it did seem that vista needed more RAM, but not a big deal.  Figure eventually dx10 games will be out that are totally dx10 which requires vista.</p><p> my system specs</p><p>OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64bitProcessor: E8400 at 3.825 water cooledMobo: asus p5eRAM: 4gb corsair 2 sticksEVGA 8800GTWD 7200</p>

[Cassea]

Vista 64 runs EQ2 just fine.Just like people had issues when Win XP first came out because they were running on Win98 systems, you need the proper system to run Vista. Microsoft, for sure, popped far too many "Runs Vista" stickers on systems they should not have.Drivers-Drivers-Drivers!It's all about drivers. If you have "real" drivers for Vista you will be fine. If you have hacked drivers in which the company just did the "bare minimum" just to allow Vista to run then you may have issues.Vista is not perfect but it's not the POS OS that many would have you think. If you used Vista and had issues recently with updated drivers then by all means share your experience but PLEASE PLEASE stop this....My brother's sister's uncle's cousin's dog said Vista Sucks so it must be true and I'm going to help spread this wealth of information even though I never used Vista myself.My system:Vista 64 Home4 gig of memory ($65 now LOL so no reason for anyone to run Vista with only 1 gig!)Nvidia 9600GT (Was running on an ATI 3850 just fine before)AMD "Black Edition" X2 running at 3200mhz-JBP.S. For the love of !@#$%^ will SOE please put the shader code on the video card where it belongs. This is 2008 and not 2001 <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY<img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />" />P.P.S. Multi-threading Multi-Core CPU's are not going away.... please rewrite some of your code to use the other cores. It's just silly and stupid to have bad performance on a quad core cpu just because SOE does not feel like updating their code. Most Quad cores run slower (mhz-wise) vs their single or dual core counterparts and to have people actually "slow down" EQ2 because they just upgraded is really dumb in 2008!Example: Which runs EQ2 faster?1. 2x core 3200mhz CPU for $852. 3x core 2500mhz CPU for $1603. 4x core 2500mhz CPU for $200+Answer: #1Why? Because EQ2 will only use one core and ignores the second, third or 100th core! Yes 2x cores are a bit better because windows will run the OS one one core and EQ2 on the other but more cores past 2 do nothing or very very little for EQ2 and by adding more cores that run slower (MHZ) you actually downgrade your EQ2 performance!So as people "upgrade" their computers they downgrade their EQ2 performance!!!! Real smart and something people will be really happy about!

[Beghauns]

<cite>Cassea wrote:</cite><blockquote>Vista 64 runs EQ2 just fine.Just like people had issues when Win XP first came out because they were running on Win98 systems, you need the proper system to run Vista. Microsoft, for sure, popped far too many "Runs Vista" stickers on systems they should not have.Drivers-Drivers-Drivers!It's all about drivers. If you have "real" drivers for Vista you will be fine. If you have hacked drivers in which the company just did the "bare minimum" just to allow Vista to run then you may have issues.Vista is not perfect but it's not the POS OS that many would have you think. If you used Vista and had issues recently with updated drivers then by all means share your experience but PLEASE PLEASE stop this....My brother's sister's uncle's cousin's dog said Vista Sucks so it must be true and I'm going to help spread this wealth of information even though I never used Vista myself.My system:Vista 64 Home4 gig of memory ($65 now LOL so no reason for anyone to run Vista with only 1 gig!)Nvidia 9600GT (Was running on an ATI 3850 just fine before)AMD "Black Edition" X2 running at 3200mhz-JBP.S. For the love of !@#$%^ will SOE please put the shader code on the video card where it belongs. This is 2008 and not 2001 <img src="/eq2/images/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY<img src=" width="15" height="15" />">P.P.S. Multi-threading Multi-Core CPU's are not going away.... please rewrite some of your code to use the other cores. It's just silly and stupid to have bad performance on a quad core cpu just because SOE does not feel like updating their code. Most Quad cores run slower (mhz-wise) vs their single or dual core counterparts and to have people actually "slow down" EQ2 because they just upgraded is really dumb in 2008!Example: Which runs EQ2 faster?1. 2x core 3200mhz CPU for $852. 3x core 2500mhz CPU for $1603. 4x core 2500mhz CPU for $200+Answer: #1Why? Because EQ2 will only use one core and ignores the second, third or 100th core! Yes 2x cores are a bit better because windows will run the OS one one core and EQ2 on the other but more cores past 2 do nothing or very very little for EQ2 and by adding more cores that run slower (MHZ) you actually downgrade your EQ2 performance!So as people "upgrade" their computers they downgrade their EQ2 performance!!!! Real smart and something people will be really happy about!</blockquote>I don't know of many games that are multi threaded which allows the os to determine what runs on what, other then a few games less then a year old.  I'd imagine it would would easier to just rewrite the whole game then try and introduce threading and thread sync.  I'd agree on the shader part though.

[Cassea]

Well LOTRO, for example, was designed to run on multi-cores and yes I know that a game needs to be written from the ground up to take full advantage. I also know that it can be a real b--ch writing multi-threaded games but it can be done.While I do not expect SOE to re-write EQ2 from the ground up (SWG is based on the same game engine) I do expect them to slowly rewrite "parts" of the game to try and keep the game current.EQ1 seems to have been re-written over and over and while most of that is just new paint on top of old, they did totally rewrite some parts of EQ1 to bring it up to date. BTW EQ1 is also a single core game.I will not pretend to know how to do this and perhaps it's far to late to do something like this but I find it hard to believe that there has been little updates to the core SWG/EQ2 game engine in all these years. I remember playing at launch and being told that the SWG/EQ2 game engine was "future proof" because as computers got faster then so would EQ2.Well computers are no longer getting faster... in some respects they are getting slower due to multi-cores.To EQ2 a 10 zillion core 2500mhz computer is no faster than a 2500mhz single core CPU. This is sad!Clearly some routines could be off-loaded either to the video cards or extra cores.Video Cards are another matter. When a $50 video card runs EQ2 almost as good as a $300 video card then something is wrong.I'm not stupid. I know that programmers cost $$$ and the more programmers they add the less $$$ SOE makes. I want continued expansions and it seems like SOE (I'm guessing) will either allocate programmers for expansions or updates but not both. If I had to pick one I would rather they add expansions but why can't we have both?EQ2 is a far more modular program over the mess that EQ1 was and prob still is. I fail to see how they could not allocate a single programmer to take one routine at a time and update it. Perhaps they are already doing this. The Vertex fix was a nice start so I hope this means they are already doing what I suggest <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />Now where are those new skeletal characters that are supposed to speed up the game? <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />-JB

[Webin]

<cite>Cassea wrote:</cite><blockquote>...a 10 zillion core 2500mhz computer...</blockquote>Well that's just crazy....I only have a dual-core CPU at this point, but like the fact that I can easily run Outlook, Firefox, Vent, IMs, etc on the second core without EQ2 being effected (other than memory usage).  Ideally, we could configure how many cores to allow the game client to use.I think the video processing is more important at this point.  There is a huge number of routines EQ2 should be offloading to the video GPU, but are still being handled by the CPU.  That's why even with the mightest video card in the land, Norrath still doesn't look as good as Crysis or HL2  (not that it should push it that far).  SOE intentionally kept the client CPU-intensive to help keep system requirements to a minimum (but increase player base), but has been slow to keep up with the now much more powerful video cards.  Microsoft Flight Simulator has always been the same way.I do think they are getting better though.  SOE has programmers that know what to do, it's just a matter of spending resources (time and money) to do the work needed.

[Cassea]

<cite>LordTuatha wrote:</cite><blockquote>Now whether that's because NVIDIA, Creative Labs and such are more familiar with XP when writing drivers, or because Vista is a PoS that never should have been released, is up for debate.  The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.  I will only say that if Microsoft had released a quality product they would quit extending the date of XP support stoppage.  </blockquote>To this day Creative Labs has not produced stable drivers for Vista and EAX is not supported under Vista because it was written under Directsound which Vista does not have. There is an emulator for this but it's still not very good.Vista is in far better shape than Xp was at the 1 year date. People seem to forget the problems they had with XP at the one year mark. Once again back then as is now Creative Labs drivers were terrible!If you do a fresh install (NEVER install Vista over a copy of XP!) with hardware that has good drivers and Vista will rule.The problem is that it only takes a single bad driver to mess things up and then , of course, it's Microsoft's fault because they write every driver on the planet <img src="/smilies/3b63d1616c5dfcf29f8a7a031aaa7cad.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" />Microsoft is extending XP support because they still have boneheaded customers who either refuse to upgrade systems or do not want to pay to retrain people. Funny how I seemed to have picked up the few differences with Vista in a few hours of use but these big corps seem to have to spend millions training people on where to find the on-off switch.Yes there are programs that still do not run 100% under Vista. If you run one of these then by all means stay with XP. No one is forcing you to upgrade just as no one forced people to upgrade from Win 98 to XP years ago.I find it funny that some of the same people who now proclaim "Vista sucks... all you will every need is XP" are the same who a few years ago said "WinXP sucks... all you will ever need is Win98"WinXP takes too much memory, WinXP is too slow in games, WinXP has buggy drivers, WinXP does not run all my Win98 programs!Fast forward to 2008Vista takes too much memory, Vista is too slow in games, Vista has buggy drivers, Vista does not run all my WinXP programs!Just as WinXP had bugs and drivers issues that were worked out, Vista is no different but I will say that Vista at 1 year is far better than XP at one year if you care to be fair and honest.-JB

[Keltherin]

<p>Ive been running XP Pro having been septical about Vista and have just installed the Vista 64-bit home as a dual boot on my system.</p><p>It installed and runs eq2 fine. Needed a few new drivers but no biggy I expected that and is running great. Ive had no lock ups or crashes due to the graphics driver not responding which i was getting quite abit of under XP and I can funally see all 4 gigs of my ram!</p><p>I think ill keep XP installed to check out SP3 so i can compare the 2, but so far im quite happy with vistas performance.</p><p>You quite often hear about how differences in performance of x% but in most cases do we really notice it?</p>