VISTA

[fishsmith]

Great review Sandman.

So far I'm happy.

Today I'll try to install Office 2003.

I need lots of emulators for my job, I support WebshpereMQ. its installed on 100's of servers most of which are unix, but also mainframe, VMS, Tandem, linux and windows. No doubt windows require the most support.

So far I have successfully installed exceed, putty, pagenet and fuji finepix, some hiccups with finepix, but no show stoppers until I tried to load nortel's VPN that worked on xp, it will not load, keeps kicking back "unknown O/S". Without this everything I installed is basically useless outside of work. Looks like March 2nd is the date Nortel will have a compatible version.

[Mr. Sandman]

As for the driver support, I think most printers and cameras and things will be fine. I noticed however that not all of the really hot graphics boards were not offered with Vista (yet)...they seem to be adding more all the time though. Mine is a Nvida 7900 Gsomething and it seems more than enough for what I need for the next few years.

My son will agree with you on your graphics board thoughts that is for sure. He could care less about the noise he want to run his games at max res and max framerate and will spend hundreds of his own $ to do it. I keep trying to throttle his deisre to upgrade...its almost like a drug. (I wonder where he got that from? ) Me, I like silent machines. There is something elegant about a powerful machine that is completely scilent. I will probably move this machine to the other side of the wall into a pantry just to keep it quiet in my office. I think if you are into gaming or do a lot of DVD or TV watching on your computer you really need the graphics power, I do little gaming but use a post-processing 3D viewing software that relies heavy on OpenGl. Also the calendar photo shop stuff runs better with the board.

My son plays the new ms flight sim and that thing looks amazing in full detail but it max's out his machine, and it s fairly new. At least he uses the horsepower.

[likwid]

NVidia has been slow on the uptake with stable drivers, they kind of slacked during the whole beta/RC phase of things.

ATI/AMD have been releasing drivers as fast as possible to ensure complete compatibility the whole time.

The Orlando Radeon team has gone through about 20 revisions of drivers in the past month alone.

[jugstah]

ATI has always had good tech support, and I've always liked having ATI cards since about '98... before that, I thought they were crap but they've come a long way.

[BrianS]

i dont know whats happened, but magically overnight my nvidia card is working flawlessly.

i took my vista drive out, put it back in after my xp drive hosed... and voila! no crackly badness in WoW.

[Mr. Sandman]

more on vista...

One of my officejet printers is not "fully" functional under vista at this time. It works and prints and scans from any software ap but if you walk up and press the "scan" button it doesn't work...upon looking into it the Hp driver does not support all the features just yet...a minor thing but I guess this is commonplace.

Also after using it now for a few weeks I have been monitoring the performance, CPU, disk, Ram, and network now pretty closely just to see how it behaves. I can't over emphasize having the most memory your budget can afford. This think likes lots of elbow room, it likes to build up an enormous cache at times (I think to support this "superfetch" feature) for fast access and will use whatever memory you have....I am talking gigs of memory. The dual-core is nice in that you reduce latency when multiple things are ongoing which is normally the case. Disk access is generally the hold up now. Shoulda gotta RAID set up.

[fishsmith]

I'm happy as a pig in $hit with vista. I never played much with pcs because what I had was slow and since I sit in front of one day in and day out my interest using them was nill.

BUT I love the Media Center, so far i've got 103cds loaded and now my laptop dubs as my ultimate jukebox.

I still havent gotten nortels VPN to work, but i've opted to use asg and now I can connect from anywhere, whether thats a good or bad thing remains to be seen.

I'm glad I didn't go with XP, I think big Bill G did good with this.

[MrHunters]

Originally Posted by BrianS

i dont know whats happened, but magically overnight my nvidia card is working flawlessly.

i took my vista drive out, put it back in after my xp drive hosed... and voila! no crackly badness in WoW.

Brian, what kind of sound card do you have. when you say crackly badness are you taking about sound? cause im getting that kind of crackly badness.