New Computer: To Vista, Or Not To Vista...

Netzoko · 05-10-2007, 04:57 PM

I plan on getting a new computer pretty soon from Alienware. However, I'm not sure if Vista would be better for EQ2 than Xp would. Could anyone answer this? Would there be any difference at all?

Despak · 05-10-2007, 05:33 PM

I use Vista Home Premium. Not had a problem with ever.

Frames dropped by maybe 1fps overall.

TSR-GarethC · 05-10-2007, 05:58 PM

Less problems overall are seen with XP. Vista will eventually be relatively problem free I'm sure.

WAPCE · 05-10-2007, 10:19 PM

Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242

FaileE · 05-11-2007, 05:07 AM

WAPCE wrote:

Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242

Hm, I wonder why some websites are whining about Vista being such a waste of time and money and how games all run so much worse when most normal people who are actually USING Vista completly and for everything say it's barely noticable.

Wanna hear something totally wacko ? EQ2 runs a lot smoother on Vista 64 bit than on XP for me ! Crazy stuff. I've been using Vista 64 bit for more than 2 months and read a lot of Microsoft and Vista bashing, I can only say that 95% of all the stuff ppl are whining about comes down to this :

- crap drivers....Nvidia and many other companies obviously were caught totally by surprise when Vista was released at the end of january as announced half a year before that and after YEARS of beta testing. Nobody could have guessed that it'll really be released ever. It's gotten a LOT better now, btw

- user error - It's one thing bashing something for REAL bugs, but doing something wrong yourself and then whining how Microsoft sucks cause they didn't anticipate total and utter stupidity....priceless

- old PC - well guys, this OS has been planned for current high middle range PCs. Don't except it to run better than XP on your 2+ years old rig

To answer the OP, I'd go for Vista if what you buy is a decent and up to date PC. It works fine, turning off UAC takes 30 secs, most XP games work without any problems. If you want to run real old games you can always use stuff like dosbox. Vista will become mainstream over time and why blow money on XP now only to have to buy Vista sometime to play the newest hottest game SMILEY

antwar · 05-11-2007, 02:57 PM

UAC security is a drag to be sure, but i dont recommend someone who is not familiar with PCs in general, such as replacing your own video card, upgrading ram, etc. to turn it off... it can really stop the spyware/malware that likes to install itself behind the scenes without your consent.

that said, vista itself is ok, but i would not recommend anything less than 2 gigs of ram for a vista gaming machine, preferably 4 gigs of ram. yes i said 4 gigs of ram. look at the trend of every new version of windows doubling the ammount of ram needed to run it efficiently without alot of hard drive thrashing... windows 98SE needed 128 for just windows itself, 256 was recommended for gaming, windows 2k needed 256 for itself, 512 was recommended for gaming, xp needed 512 for itself, 1 gig recommended minimum for gaming (now its 2 gigs considering todays games, but when it came out, 1 gig was fine.), now with vista, you NEED 1 gig of system ram to run the OS itself without major hard drive thrashing, 2 gigs makes a HUGE diff when gaming. 4 gigs just makes it all the more sweeter, because of the new memory managment inside the OS itself... much more efficient than xp when you throw more ram at it. yes you take a performance hit as opposed to xp, but if you run 4 gigs of ram and not just 2 gigs, the performance hit is minimal at worst, non-existant at best.

for those with UAC problems when trying to run games installed while it was on, have you tried turning off UAC, installing the game, then turning UAC back on again? seems to me that might solve those problems of "run as admin", and "run in compatibility mode", but as i do not have vista OEM yet, i cannot try it myself. i used the beta but i have not installed it in a while, and the beta stuff will expire soon anyway, so its not worth me even trying.

dawy · 05-11-2007, 06:01 PM

Got to be vista if its a new pc bit silly to go back to xp,i've just upgraded to it myself with no problems at all.

Ohh and disable UAC its a right royal pain in the [Removed for Content] tbh

DataOutlaw · 05-11-2007, 06:17 PM

It depends on a lot of factors...

First of all if your choices are Vista Home Premium or XP Pro dump the vista home premium and install XP Pro. Vista Home Premium has stupid restrictions on capabilities. If the choice is Vista Ultimate that makes it a much more comparable choice and it should then come down to drive availability and other software compatibility concerns you may have.

For me, I got a new system with w Core 2 Duo processor and an NVidia Quadro graphics card and I went Vista 64 bit and have had no problems whatsoever. EQ2 runs smooth and looks beautifull even when I am running it in windowed mode with tons of other crap going on on the second monitor at the same time.

The only issue I have had with Vista 64 (Enterprise edition) was that there are no available USB or ExpressCard (its a laptop) Gigabit ethernet devices with Vista64 drivers out yet so I can't add a 2nd NIC.

Wingrider01 · 05-12-2007, 09:35 AM

dawy wrote:

Got to be vista if its a new pc bit silly to go back to xp,i've just upgraded to it myself with no problems at all.
Ohh and disable UAC its a right royal pain in the [I cannot control my vocabulary] tbh

Then why bother installing Vista? The new security model is workable, have gotten 99 percent of the applications that I run for both myself and the kids to function, it is not a plug and pray operation like XP was - you give your user Admin rights and things run fine - which also gives any trojan that can get onto your system admin rights. Out of the the SOE games that I use, have only had major issues with Planetside in getting that one to run reliably, other then that eq1,eq2,swg,pirates,MO all run reliably.

Wingrider01 · 05-12-2007, 09:39 AM

WAPCE wrote:

Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242

funny, have not seen that great of a performance hit on vista, but then again places like that just through the OS on, try the test then format the drive and move on to the next paid review. Works for XP, but Vista needs time to settle in and adjust itself for performance, installed Vista Ultimate 32 bit gold back in November of 06, over the first month or so, the Vista box's performance increase.

I seem to remember that December of this year is when MS drops the availablity of XP to system builders

Josgar · 05-13-2007, 02:51 AM

FaileEQ2 wrote:

WAPCE wrote:
Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242
Hm, I wonder why some websites are whining about Vista being such a waste of time and money and how games all run so much worse when most normal people who are actually USING Vista completly and for everything say it's barely noticable.
Wanna hear something totally wacko ? EQ2 runs a lot smoother on Vista 64 bit than on XP for me ! Crazy stuff. I've been using Vista 64 bit for more than 2 months and read a lot of Microsoft and Vista bashing, I can only say that 95% of all the stuff ppl are whining about comes down to this :
- crap drivers....Nvidia and many other companies obviously were caught totally by surprise when Vista was released at the end of january as announced half a year before that and after YEARS of beta testing. Nobody could have guessed that it'll really be released ever. It's gotten a LOT better now, btw
except for geforce go 7600 cards... no one has working drivers for them >.>
- user error - It's one thing bashing something for REAL bugs, but doing something wrong yourself and then whining how Microsoft sucks cause they didn't anticipate total and utter stupidity....priceless
- old PC - well guys, this OS has been planned for current high middle range PCs. Don't except it to run better than XP on your 2+ years old rig
To answer the OP, I'd go for Vista if what you buy is a decent and up to date PC. It works fine, turning off UAC takes 30 secs, most XP games work without any problems. If you want to run real old games you can always use stuff like dosbox. Vista will become mainstream over time and why blow money on XP now only to have to buy Vista sometime to play the newest hottest game

Wingrider01 · 05-13-2007, 09:28 AM

Josgar wrote:

FaileEQ2 wrote:
WAPCE wrote:
Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242
Hm, I wonder why some websites are whining about Vista being such a waste of time and money and how games all run so much worse when most normal people who are actually USING Vista completly and for everything say it's barely noticable.
Wanna hear something totally wacko ? EQ2 runs a lot smoother on Vista 64 bit than on XP for me ! Crazy stuff. I've been using Vista 64 bit for more than 2 months and read a lot of Microsoft and Vista bashing, I can only say that 95% of all the stuff ppl are whining about comes down to this :
- crap drivers....Nvidia and many other companies obviously were caught totally by surprise when Vista was released at the end of january as announced half a year before that and after YEARS of beta testing. Nobody could have guessed that it'll really be released ever. It's gotten a LOT better now, btw
except for geforce go 7600 cards... no one has working drivers for them >.>
- user error - It's one thing bashing something for REAL bugs, but doing something wrong yourself and then whining how Microsoft sucks cause they didn't anticipate total and utter stupidity....priceless
- old PC - well guys, this OS has been planned for current high middle range PCs. Don't except it to run better than XP on your 2+ years old rig
To answer the OP, I'd go for Vista if what you buy is a decent and up to date PC. It works fine, turning off UAC takes 30 secs, most XP games work without any problems. If you want to run real old games you can always use stuff like dosbox. Vista will become mainstream over time and why blow money on XP now only to have to buy Vista sometime to play the newest hottest game

1. Considering the Go 7600 is a laptop card, then itis up to the manufacturer of the laptop to supply a workng Vista driver for the card.

2. Most, if not all of the XP games will function correctly up Vista with the UAC turned on, you just have to take some time out and set it up correctly. Why bother going to Vista when you turn off the security model include in the OS? You make the OS less secure then a unpatched install of Windows XP.

TheSource123 · 05-13-2007, 06:25 PM

IMHO Vista is great for some games, and terrible for others. It's to be expected w/ a new OS, anyways. Oblivion FPS dropped by 10-5, however the framerate is far more, consistent. No more 40-20 FPS drops when going outside. Now it's more like 35-30. FEAR FPS dropped slightly(very slightly) EVE got about 10 FPS EQ2 FPS stayed about the same with less hitching & choppyness UT2004 Dropped from 130-110/90ish Nexus lost about 5 FPS but now HDR actually WORKS, w00T!!!!!!!! For god's sake go buy Nexus right now so we can get a sequel to the best non-RTS space game ever!!!! SMILEY

I've noticed it seems to use your CPU better, but graphics card performance suffers slightly. Other than a few issues w/ Linksys I'm not too upset, and it's nowhere near as bad as the Vanguard esq. train wreck reports on the internet told me it would be.

05-10-2007, 10:19 PM	#4
WAPCE Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 774	Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242 __________________ Adblock Plus (with EasyList x3) Flashblock

05-11-2007, 05:07 AM	#5
FaileE General Join Date: Dec 2004 Posts: 18	WAPCE wrote: Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242 Hm, I wonder why some websites are whining about Vista being such a waste of time and money and how games all run so much worse when most normal people who are actually USING Vista completly and for everything say it's barely noticable. Wanna hear something totally wacko ? EQ2 runs a lot smoother on Vista 64 bit than on XP for me ! Crazy stuff. I've been using Vista 64 bit for more than 2 months and read a lot of Microsoft and Vista bashing, I can only say that 95% of all the stuff ppl are whining about comes down to this : - crap drivers....Nvidia and many other companies obviously were caught totally by surprise when Vista was released at the end of january as announced half a year before that and after YEARS of beta testing. Nobody could have guessed that it'll really be released ever. It's gotten a LOT better now, btw - user error - It's one thing bashing something for REAL bugs, but doing something wrong yourself and then whining how Microsoft sucks cause they didn't anticipate total and utter stupidity....priceless - old PC - well guys, this OS has been planned for current high middle range PCs. Don't except it to run better than XP on your 2+ years old rig To answer the OP, I'd go for Vista if what you buy is a decent and up to date PC. It works fine, turning off UAC takes 30 secs, most XP games work without any problems. If you want to run real old games you can always use stuff like dosbox. Vista will become mainstream over time and why blow money on XP now only to have to buy Vista sometime to play the newest hottest game

05-11-2007, 06:17 PM	#8
DataOutlaw Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 142	It depends on a lot of factors... First of all if your choices are Vista Home Premium or XP Pro dump the vista home premium and install XP Pro. Vista Home Premium has stupid restrictions on capabilities. If the choice is Vista Ultimate that makes it a much more comparable choice and it should then come down to drive availability and other software compatibility concerns you may have. For me, I got a new system with w Core 2 Duo processor and an NVidia Quadro graphics card and I went Vista 64 bit and have had no problems whatsoever. EQ2 runs smooth and looks beautifull even when I am running it in windowed mode with tons of other crap going on on the second monitor at the same time. The only issue I have had with Vista 64 (Enterprise edition) was that there are no available USB or ExpressCard (its a laptop) Gigabit ethernet devices with Vista64 drivers out yet so I can't add a 2nd NIC. __________________ DataOutlaw, a man of many alts Animale: Barbarian Ranger Twiggles: Wood Elf Druid Kahnjoor: Gnome Conjurer Starkeepr: High Elf Wizard Grappe: Froglok Mystic Sinbhad: Kerran Paladin Shortuff: Dwarven Templar Positronic: Human Monk Swiftbow: Froglok Ranger Swiftscimitar: Kerran Fury

05-12-2007, 09:35 AM	#9
Wingrider01 Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 5,999	dawy wrote: Got to be vista if its a new pc bit silly to go back to xp,i've just upgraded to it myself with no problems at all. Ohh and disable UAC its a right royal pain in the [I cannot control my vocabulary] tbh Then why bother installing Vista? The new security model is workable, have gotten 99 percent of the applications that I run for both myself and the kids to function, it is not a plug and pray operation like XP was - you give your user Admin rights and things run fine - which also gives any trojan that can get onto your system admin rights. Out of the the SOE games that I use, have only had major issues with Planetside in getting that one to run reliably, other then that eq1,eq2,swg,pirates,MO all run reliably. __________________ Fixing computer issues, one SOC7 at a time. Yes Jim, the user has experienced the dreaded PICNIC error

05-12-2007, 09:39 AM	#10
Wingrider01 Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 5,999	WAPCE wrote: Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242 funny, have not seen that great of a performance hit on vista, but then again places like that just through the OS on, try the test then format the drive and move on to the next paid review. Works for XP, but Vista needs time to settle in and adjust itself for performance, installed Vista Ultimate 32 bit gold back in November of 06, over the first month or so, the Vista box's performance increase. I seem to remember that December of this year is when MS drops the availablity of XP to system builders __________________ Fixing computer issues, one SOC7 at a time. Yes Jim, the user has experienced the dreaded PICNIC error

05-10-2007, 04:57 PM	#1
Netzoko Loremaster Join Date: May 2007 Location: Nagafen Posts: 142	I plan on getting a new computer pretty soon from Alienware. However, I'm not sure if Vista would be better for EQ2 than Xp would. Could anyone answer this? Would there be any difference at all?

05-10-2007, 05:33 PM	#2
Despak Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 424	I use Vista Home Premium. Not had a problem with ever. Frames dropped by maybe 1fps overall.

05-10-2007, 05:58 PM	#3
TSR-GarethC Master Join Date: Mar 2007 Posts: 255	Less problems overall are seen with XP. Vista will eventually be relatively problem free I'm sure.

05-11-2007, 02:57 PM	#6
antwar General Join Date: Oct 2006 Posts: 169	UAC security is a drag to be sure, but i dont recommend someone who is not familiar with PCs in general, such as replacing your own video card, upgrading ram, etc. to turn it off... it can really stop the spyware/malware that likes to install itself behind the scenes without your consent. that said, vista itself is ok, but i would not recommend anything less than 2 gigs of ram for a vista gaming machine, preferably 4 gigs of ram. yes i said 4 gigs of ram. look at the trend of every new version of windows doubling the ammount of ram needed to run it efficiently without alot of hard drive thrashing... windows 98SE needed 128 for just windows itself, 256 was recommended for gaming, windows 2k needed 256 for itself, 512 was recommended for gaming, xp needed 512 for itself, 1 gig recommended minimum for gaming (now its 2 gigs considering todays games, but when it came out, 1 gig was fine.), now with vista, you NEED 1 gig of system ram to run the OS itself without major hard drive thrashing, 2 gigs makes a HUGE diff when gaming. 4 gigs just makes it all the more sweeter, because of the new memory managment inside the OS itself... much more efficient than xp when you throw more ram at it. yes you take a performance hit as opposed to xp, but if you run 4 gigs of ram and not just 2 gigs, the performance hit is minimal at worst, non-existant at best. for those with UAC problems when trying to run games installed while it was on, have you tried turning off UAC, installing the game, then turning UAC back on again? seems to me that might solve those problems of "run as admin", and "run in compatibility mode", but as i do not have vista OEM yet, i cannot try it myself. i used the beta but i have not installed it in a while, and the beta stuff will expire soon anyway, so its not worth me even trying.

05-11-2007, 06:01 PM	#7
dawy Loremaster Join Date: Mar 2005 Posts: 1,373	Got to be vista if its a new pc bit silly to go back to xp,i've just upgraded to it myself with no problems at all. Ohh and disable UAC its a right royal pain in the [Removed for Content] tbh

05-13-2007, 02:51 AM	#11
Josgar Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 2,606	FaileEQ2 wrote: WAPCE wrote: Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242 Hm, I wonder why some websites are whining about Vista being such a waste of time and money and how games all run so much worse when most normal people who are actually USING Vista completly and for everything say it's barely noticable. Wanna hear something totally wacko ? EQ2 runs a lot smoother on Vista 64 bit than on XP for me ! Crazy stuff. I've been using Vista 64 bit for more than 2 months and read a lot of Microsoft and Vista bashing, I can only say that 95% of all the stuff ppl are whining about comes down to this : - crap drivers....Nvidia and many other companies obviously were caught totally by surprise when Vista was released at the end of january as announced half a year before that and after YEARS of beta testing. Nobody could have guessed that it'll really be released ever. It's gotten a LOT better now, btw except for geforce go 7600 cards... no one has working drivers for them >.> - user error - It's one thing bashing something for REAL bugs, but doing something wrong yourself and then whining how Microsoft sucks cause they didn't anticipate total and utter stupidity....priceless - old PC - well guys, this OS has been planned for current high middle range PCs. Don't except it to run better than XP on your 2+ years old rig To answer the OP, I'd go for Vista if what you buy is a decent and up to date PC. It works fine, turning off UAC takes 30 secs, most XP games work without any problems. If you want to run real old games you can always use stuff like dosbox. Vista will become mainstream over time and why blow money on XP now only to have to buy Vista sometime to play the newest hottest game

05-13-2007, 09:28 AM	#12
Wingrider01 Loremaster Join Date: Nov 2004 Posts: 5,999	Josgar wrote: FaileEQ2 wrote: WAPCE wrote: Pretty significant performance hit, too. http://games.slashdot.org/article.p...07/05/08/125242 Hm, I wonder why some websites are whining about Vista being such a waste of time and money and how games all run so much worse when most normal people who are actually USING Vista completly and for everything say it's barely noticable. Wanna hear something totally wacko ? EQ2 runs a lot smoother on Vista 64 bit than on XP for me ! Crazy stuff. I've been using Vista 64 bit for more than 2 months and read a lot of Microsoft and Vista bashing, I can only say that 95% of all the stuff ppl are whining about comes down to this : - crap drivers....Nvidia and many other companies obviously were caught totally by surprise when Vista was released at the end of january as announced half a year before that and after YEARS of beta testing. Nobody could have guessed that it'll really be released ever. It's gotten a LOT better now, btw except for geforce go 7600 cards... no one has working drivers for them >.> - user error - It's one thing bashing something for REAL bugs, but doing something wrong yourself and then whining how Microsoft sucks cause they didn't anticipate total and utter stupidity....priceless - old PC - well guys, this OS has been planned for current high middle range PCs. Don't except it to run better than XP on your 2+ years old rig To answer the OP, I'd go for Vista if what you buy is a decent and up to date PC. It works fine, turning off UAC takes 30 secs, most XP games work without any problems. If you want to run real old games you can always use stuff like dosbox. Vista will become mainstream over time and why blow money on XP now only to have to buy Vista sometime to play the newest hottest game 1. Considering the Go 7600 is a laptop card, then itis up to the manufacturer of the laptop to supply a workng Vista driver for the card. 2. Most, if not all of the XP games will function correctly up Vista with the UAC turned on, you just have to take some time out and set it up correctly. Why bother going to Vista when you turn off the security model include in the OS? You make the OS less secure then a unpatched install of Windows XP. __________________ Fixing computer issues, one SOC7 at a time. Yes Jim, the user has experienced the dreaded PICNIC error

05-13-2007, 06:25 PM	#13
TheSource123 Master Join Date: Feb 2007 Posts: 109	IMHO Vista is great for some games, and terrible for others. It's to be expected w/ a new OS, anyways. Oblivion FPS dropped by 10-5, however the framerate is far more, consistent. No more 40-20 FPS drops when going outside. Now it's more like 35-30. FEAR FPS dropped slightly(very slightly) EVE got about 10 FPS EQ2 FPS stayed about the same with less hitching & choppyness UT2004 Dropped from 130-110/90ish Nexus lost about 5 FPS but now HDR actually WORKS, w00T!!!!!!!! For god's sake go buy Nexus right now so we can get a sequel to the best non-RTS space game ever!!!! I've noticed it seems to use your CPU better, but graphics card performance suffers slightly. Other than a few issues w/ Linksys I'm not too upset, and it's nowhere near as bad as the Vanguard esq. train wreck reports on the internet told me it would be.