themisfit610
Golden Member
Well, the thread title says it all
I had Vista x64 installed for a good 6 weeks. Initially I was very pleased!
The install itself was painless, and very much improved over XP. The interface is very nice, and after disabling UAC and getting things tweaked to my preference the OS felt pretty speedy.
However, several "gotchas" cropped up as I continued to use Vista x64.
1) No iPhone support. Nope. Sorry. I had to activate (and sync) my iPhone through an XP Virtual Machine, which was not pretty, or consistently reliable.
2) TERRIBLE drivers from Creative. My Audigy 2 ZS sounds absolutely terrible. All sorts of distortion and so forth. Issues with kernel streaming, crashing to desktop when I switch from 5.1 to 2ch mode while playing a game, you name it. Endless problems here. My Realtek onboard performed overall much better in Vista x64 (and that's sad).
I even ended up breaking out my Chaintech AV710 sound card with its VIA Envy24 chip. This had decent drivers (not perfect, but feature complete with the XP version).
BUT I ran into a nasty little snag with this card and its x64 drivers. About 1 out of 5 times when I boot up, it b0rks my nVidia ethernet, to the point where I get an exclamation in device manager, and the driver does not load. Disabling the Envy24 and rebooting works, then re-enabling (on the fly) the Envy24 works. However, unless the driver loads on startup, its control panel doesn't work! Major MAJOR pain in the ass for someone like me who is constantly adjusting his audio settings
Most of these driver issues aren't really Vista's fault, but they come with the package. My harware + Vista x64 = 🙁
3) A deep hatred for the Vista image viewer. Why? Incorrect colors, and a TERRIBLE scaling algorithm that looks like "nearest neighbor" to me. The XP image viewer was VASTLY superior. An image viewer is supposed to be just that, an image viewer. I don't care if they added simple retouching tools (which destructively, irreversibly alter images as far as I can tell, including an extra JPEG compression cycle... ugh!), I have Photoshop, Lightroom, or Picassa for that.
4) Overall slowness - yes we know it's slower for compute bound tasks and in gaming. The margin isn't significant, but it's there. This is a relatively minor issue for me, but it just feels wrong when my backup PC - a Dell Sempron 3400+ with 1GB of RAM feels faster on the desktop than my main box (see sig)
5) Dodgy user profiles - I had an issue where Vista forgot where my "Documents" folder pointed to. This eventually cleared on its own, but it was very disconcerting
6) Wierdness with the EVR renderer and different video card driver versions, DXVA2 hardware acceleration for HD-DVD etc... It all seems to work just fine on XP
The way I see it, the only thing I loose from going back to 32 bit XP is support for larger amounts of RAM. I had planned on upgrading to 4 GB with my next build, but I think I'll stick with 32 bit XP for awhile. It's simpler, cleaner, and overall a bit faster. I think I can give up the nicer interface from Vista and things like Superfetch and DX10 (at least, until there are cards that can play Crysis at "Very High" at 1920x1200 without issues.
It's been a bumpy road, and honestly there were times when I really liked Vista a whole lot. There are plenty of good things about it, and Microsoft has a solid OS on their hands. It just needs more maturation, and vendors need to get the 64 bit versions of their drivers up to par (CREATIVE and APPLE namely).
I'll give things a try when I get a new graphics card that really makes DX10 pop. Or when I get my next masochistic itch... We'll see.
For now, no thanks.
~MiSfit
I had Vista x64 installed for a good 6 weeks. Initially I was very pleased!
The install itself was painless, and very much improved over XP. The interface is very nice, and after disabling UAC and getting things tweaked to my preference the OS felt pretty speedy.
However, several "gotchas" cropped up as I continued to use Vista x64.
1) No iPhone support. Nope. Sorry. I had to activate (and sync) my iPhone through an XP Virtual Machine, which was not pretty, or consistently reliable.
2) TERRIBLE drivers from Creative. My Audigy 2 ZS sounds absolutely terrible. All sorts of distortion and so forth. Issues with kernel streaming, crashing to desktop when I switch from 5.1 to 2ch mode while playing a game, you name it. Endless problems here. My Realtek onboard performed overall much better in Vista x64 (and that's sad).
I even ended up breaking out my Chaintech AV710 sound card with its VIA Envy24 chip. This had decent drivers (not perfect, but feature complete with the XP version).
BUT I ran into a nasty little snag with this card and its x64 drivers. About 1 out of 5 times when I boot up, it b0rks my nVidia ethernet, to the point where I get an exclamation in device manager, and the driver does not load. Disabling the Envy24 and rebooting works, then re-enabling (on the fly) the Envy24 works. However, unless the driver loads on startup, its control panel doesn't work! Major MAJOR pain in the ass for someone like me who is constantly adjusting his audio settings
Most of these driver issues aren't really Vista's fault, but they come with the package. My harware + Vista x64 = 🙁
3) A deep hatred for the Vista image viewer. Why? Incorrect colors, and a TERRIBLE scaling algorithm that looks like "nearest neighbor" to me. The XP image viewer was VASTLY superior. An image viewer is supposed to be just that, an image viewer. I don't care if they added simple retouching tools (which destructively, irreversibly alter images as far as I can tell, including an extra JPEG compression cycle... ugh!), I have Photoshop, Lightroom, or Picassa for that.
4) Overall slowness - yes we know it's slower for compute bound tasks and in gaming. The margin isn't significant, but it's there. This is a relatively minor issue for me, but it just feels wrong when my backup PC - a Dell Sempron 3400+ with 1GB of RAM feels faster on the desktop than my main box (see sig)
5) Dodgy user profiles - I had an issue where Vista forgot where my "Documents" folder pointed to. This eventually cleared on its own, but it was very disconcerting
6) Wierdness with the EVR renderer and different video card driver versions, DXVA2 hardware acceleration for HD-DVD etc... It all seems to work just fine on XP
The way I see it, the only thing I loose from going back to 32 bit XP is support for larger amounts of RAM. I had planned on upgrading to 4 GB with my next build, but I think I'll stick with 32 bit XP for awhile. It's simpler, cleaner, and overall a bit faster. I think I can give up the nicer interface from Vista and things like Superfetch and DX10 (at least, until there are cards that can play Crysis at "Very High" at 1920x1200 without issues.
It's been a bumpy road, and honestly there were times when I really liked Vista a whole lot. There are plenty of good things about it, and Microsoft has a solid OS on their hands. It just needs more maturation, and vendors need to get the 64 bit versions of their drivers up to par (CREATIVE and APPLE namely).
I'll give things a try when I get a new graphics card that really makes DX10 pop. Or when I get my next masochistic itch... We'll see.
For now, no thanks.
~MiSfit
