After 4 months on Vista x64 Ultimate with 4GB of ram, 8800 GTS, E6600 @3.4 GHz, 2x 320GB in raid, well I recently uninstalled Vista and went back to XP (x86). Here is a short summary of what I personally found good and bad about Vista:
Pros:
- Looks Nice
- Runs 4GB of ram (x86 caps at like 3.2-3.5GB, but you don't need that in XP anyway...) but needs it for gaming (2GB of ram and BF2 stutters shockingly, 4GB smooth)
- Vista keeps your last BF2 map files in RAM so if you CTD (which Vista does A LOT) your verification time takes under 1 second literally. This is completely offset by the fact that it is Vista making ya crash lol....
- When backing up files (I keep 3 backup drives; used to blue screens) Vista checks if the files exist and allows you to apply your decision to all subsequent files that raise a replace or skip error. In XP you either have to camp the screen and click No to each individual file, or click yes to all and overwrite everything. Aggrovating as fuck in XP but easy as pie in Vista.
- Vista gives you transfer speed info when copying files, e.g. you can see your RAID drives actually transferring at 100mbps so you know shit is going fast instead of staring blankly at a progressbar.
- Alt tab feature of preview window is nice
- More secure than XP for sure but I recommend shutting of UAC anyways; it is still pretty secure and with NOD32 antivirus = no problems
- My sound card at first didn't work in Vista (Xtremegamer), but once they released drivers in November, it actually made my mp3s sound better than XP. The crystalizer that comes with the card just seems to work better in Vista than XP. XP it sounds like a volume boost, but in Vista it sounds like a clarity boost like it is supposed to be.
- Allows playing destructible environments in crysis dx10 servers, but there is barely any so it doesn't matter.. plus crysis is unstable as fuck in vista x64.
Really all it is good for is it looks nice.
Cons:
- XP is shockingly faster at loading everything than Vista (I ran Vista with superfetch on and off, pagefile of several sizes and off). Pagefile off + 4GB of ram in both XP and Vista was the fastest, but XP loads way faster with pagefile off.
- XP gave me a 15-20 frame boost on high settings in Crysis as expected. Death to Vista bloatware.
- Ram requirement is pathetic (2GB to use basic apps, 4GB to game). Tom's hardware just recommended going to 8GB in Vista if you are any kind of heavy user of apps... 3.2GB in XP is still better than all this shit lol.
- Lack of driver support in x64 is a pain in the ass for any odd usb devices etc that you may have
- DX10 use in Crysis was a laughable joke as most of the same shit has been hacked into DX9 configs and DX9 servers.
- x64 use in Crysis was unstable until the patch. x64 remains unuseable with PB servers in crysis so you have to use the x86 version or suffer playing with hackers. Crysis devs are so far in bed with intel and windows its fucking sad.
- PeerGuardian does not work among some other softwares that are completely buggy in x64
- Vista auto-organizes your folders, so when you copy a few new mp3s into your mp3 folder, guess what they get dispersed into the mass instead of showing up at the end of the folder like in XP. Damn I hated that about Vista.
- Vista fucks up your desktop icons religiously. It won't preserve where they are when you go into smaller resolution games than your desktop. If you use autoarrange it makes your order messy and worse, when you reboot sometimes it fucks it all up anyway... aggrovating.
- Vista search algorithm sucks balls. Seriously XP finds stuff by name 20x faster than Vista's bloatware, plus Vista's indexer whores resources in the background everyday. Shut it off, but still Vista what the fuck? Google desktop kicks its ass anyway and it only needs to run when you want it to and it provides convenient output unlike the search box shit.
- SiSOFT SANDRA and Futuremark tests consistently kick more ass in XP. Even my ram bandwidth improved 300-500mbps in XP at the same settings.
- XP is a more stable overclocker, especially with my video card and RAM.
I am sure I could bash Vista a little more but to be honest, I liked how it looked and I was glad to learn a new interface just for curiosity. I found that it is indeed bloatware and apps suffer a 15-20% loss, for instance crysis. BF2 stutters on 2GB of ram. Vista needs 4GB of ram to game, and this is on my system which laughs at BF2's requirements, but in Vista it needs 4GB of ram. I also found that Java based applications like Maple 10 suffer in Vista as the java coding seems to have issues. There are work-arounds but it gets old looking on google for every fucking thing I want to install.
So, I put XP back on and was rudely shocked at how fast it was even just loading windows and loading applications like everyday shit (Maple, Matlab, CAD, etc.). I really liked how Vista looked so I installed Vista BricoPack on my XP box and I can't be happier, it looks like Vista but performs like XP and it is free. Highly recommend you dual boot or stay with XP.
This is what my XP looks like now:
Windows XP with Bricopack
Last edited by [CANADA]_Zenmaster (2008-02-23 12:01:15)
