Upgrading to Vista: is it worth it?

[+JuggerNaut+]

my bad. fuel to the fire.

[Captain]

I bit the bullet, running Vista Ultimate x64 with SP1 now. It seems decent, did a couple tweaks to ease down the resource hogging a bit. The gaming will have to wait as I'm finishing up the long, arduous task of reinstalling important programs and customizing settings

I also ordered another 2 gigs of my OCZ Platinum XTC Rev-2. Might as well take advantage of 4 gigs now that I'm on a 64-bit OS.

[+JuggerNaut+]

i'd think you'd try gaming first cuz if it sucks you did all that previous work of installing/customizing for nothing.

[Captain]

shh

[+JuggerNaut+]

:X

[Captain]

lol, Gears of War took less than 5 minutes to install on XP. Half an hour and still going on Vista.

lol, this is gonna be good

PS. Is it just me or is it impossible to fucking multitask in Vista? XP could handle multiple heavy processes at once. In Vista however, the entire system is almost locked down when installing a game. Also, is it normal for Vista to be hogging up CPU and RAM? One of the svchost.exe processes eats up over 110K at all times, was peaking at 170K last night. Jesus, running one installer and the memory usage is at 90%

Even typing is lagged ffs

And this is all after disabling some retarded startup services.

[SoM]

go back to XP mate

[Captain]

Too late for that

[Scourge]

That is strange. Multitasking isn't a problem and installs go pretty fast too here. Sure you didn't disable something you shouldn't have?

Oh, and superfetch takes a bit of time to get settled in and efficient.

[Captain]

Nope, because it's still faster than before I disabled some stuff...even though not by much. I just tested Gears of War. Apart from losing all my saves and configs, it's actually a lot smoother than in XP even with all the DX10 eye-candy enabled.

But in XP, I could be installing a game, working on digital art in Photoshop, surfing FF, and listening to Winamp all at once without any lag or slow down. What's everyone's Vista memory and CPU usage here? Any other startup tweaks I should know about?

[Scourge]

[lvlshot]http://www.jwivie.com/vistamem.jpg[/lvlshot]

I haven't really done much as far as tweaking, just turned of some unnecessary services.

[Captain]

[Captain]

The biggest problems seem to lie with Windows Installer. Installing anything from a full-size game to a small patch will pretty much freeze up the entire system for the duration of the install. There is absolutely no way to multitask the smallest little fart when the slow down hits, otherwise it freezes up for what feels like an eternity. Crysis patches that used to take 10 seconds to install with XP now take upwards to 10 unresponsive minutes where that hideous circle icon stares at me mockingly.
But even mounting ISOs with PowerISO and copying large files from my external HDD often causes these same slow down symptoms.

Any ideas what the hell is wrong with this piece of shit OS?

EDIT: After the installation itself is over, the computer stays unresponsive and slow for a few minutes. Feels like I'm running this shit from a P2.

[+JuggerNaut+]

lol, glad you like it.

[Captain]

Performance in the games I've tested so far (Crysis, Gears, CoD4, Assassin's Creed) has been as good as XP. It's the damn OS itself that bugs me.

[+JuggerNaut+]

well that's a plus anyway. still not gone over to vista myself. prolly wait till i put together a new box this fall.

[Captain]

Hey I think I fixed it! First I installed a Windows Installer 4.5 for Vista x64. I don't know if that helped or anything, but after the reboot I popped in the Tomb Raider Anniversary DVD. This time however, I selected "run as administrator" for the setup.exe on the DVD and things seem to be running flawlessly. Game is installing fast while Winamp, FF3, and other stuff is running. No lag, no intense slowdown.

gg?

PS. Mass Effect churns out more frames on XP. It's still very fast on my rig on Vista, but I did notice a slight difference.

[Captain]

Back to XP

Now my hate for Vista is based on experience and not prejudice.

[Plan B]

The resource usage in those taskman-shots really seems ridiculously high.

Scourge, are you idling there? If so, 700+ MB seems a tad much, no?
I can see mazda isn't exactly idling, but has some light weight shit running, but almost 50% mem usage? wtf
Also, 45+ processes?

Guess I'm a bit of a compulsive tweaker, but have my xp gaming rig down to 140MB when idling.

[AmIdYfReAk]

Plan B, Vista is a wee bit ( ok, actually.. alot ) diffrent when it comes to resources..

when i was first talking to Mazduh about Vista, i had winamp ( 1.7 ), Steam, AVG ( 7.5 ), and Xfire open and i was using 1.2gigs of ram.

mind you, i never had a slow down with it.

i'm on my media center currently, and its running 32-bit vista and i'm idling with 1.01gigs used, 48 processes...

[Captain]

The resource usage in those taskman-shots really seems ridiculously high.

Scourge, are you idling there? If so, 700+ MB seems a tad much, no?
I can see mazda isn't exactly idling, but has some light weight shit running, but almost 50% mem usage? wtf
Also, 45+ processes?

Guess I'm a bit of a compulsive tweaker, but have my xp gaming rig down to 140MB when idling.

Yeah, it was pretty damn ridiculous. Yes, Vista is not at all similar to XP in resource management, but that was just way too much considering I was only running FF, Winamp, and maybe Xfire.

Hell, just now I was installing Gears of War on XP while checking in-game configs in Assassin's Creed. FF3, Xfire, and Winamp were on. No slowdown, no freezing. Owned

[Plan B]

Yeah, ok, so vista is a 'wee bit different' in that it gobbles up 5 times more of your ram resources than xp does.
I want to know why anyone would put up with that, except (trivial) DX10 implementation.

[Plan B]

...Hell, just now I was installing Gears of War on XP while checking in-game configs in Assassin's Creed. FF3, Xfire, and Winamp were on. No slowdown, no freezing. Owned

Well, there you go, good on ya.
I mean, I'm not bashing vista out of some principle, but I just can't see the benefits, and MS had enough time to make me change my mind, I think.

[Captain]

I was reluctant to try it out, but my curiosity got the better of me. I thought maybe SP1 had taken care of all those memory and game performance issues I was hearing about. I guess I had to see for myself. I missed XP so much over those couple of days

[Tormentius]

Yeah, ok, so vista is a 'wee bit different' in that it gobbles up 5 times more of your ram resources than xp does.
I want to know why anyone would put up with that, except (trivial) DX10 implementation.

Vista manages its virtual memory completely differently than previous builds so it can't be thought of in the same way you would of XP. Here's some more info on it:

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Vista-03 ... 0705.shtml

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000688.html