gogogadgetearl

2007.03.12

• So, over the weekend I gave Vista a go.  I called Casey and asked whether or not the eyecandy was worth it, and he said goof around with it to see for yourself, cuz he has only been screwing with it for a couple of days himself.  So I went to the local Busted Buy and picked up the upgrade kit for Home Premium.  Consider this my mini-review.
  
  I got the upgrade for two reasons: the first and most important was the fact that I am not going to spend $250+ on something I am gonna try out.  The second reason is equally important in that I didn't have the $250 anyway.  I had a rebate card from Cingular burning a hole in my pocket and I couldn't get cash to deposit it back to my checking account.
  
  I get home and spend about 3 minutes trying to figure out how to open the box until I find the shockingly invisible invisible tape on the side holding the box together.  Once I pulled that apart it fell open and wouldn't close again.
  
  Reading very carefully through the Quick start guide, which I didn't know operating systems had since I have always used an OEM, I noticed it recommended a clean install of your current OS before you apply the upgrade.  Problem #1, (in a large series), I didn't have a floppy drive anymore for my XP SATA drivers.  So I scoured the house looking for computers that had spare drives that weren't in use, (cuz in our house, spare machines exist, oh the joy of living with WKU tech support.)  I didn't find one.  :(
  
  Then I thought to myself that if it was just looking for a existing OS, why couldn't I use Vista and reinstall over it?  At least Vista recognizes USB drives and the Upgrade is done in Windows anyway.  So I tried it and it actually worked.
  
  The first thing I did was just overlay Vista on top of XP, not a clean install, just the upgrade.  This gave me the opportunity to back out if something happened.  Thankfully, 45 minutes later, nothing went wrong.  The process was completely automated and I just watched from the sidelines, (actually it was more like power-napped, there wasn't anything to look at on screen besides a progress meter which wasn't animated and a generic "What's New" gif that kept fading in and out).
  
  On it's initial boot, it took 4 minutes of the little Windows progress bar.  I thought it hung up, but I let it run anyway.  After that was another 5 minutes of black screen, I only let it go because I have a worn HDD that I heard clicking away.  Finally, it led me to the welcome screen where it said I had to create a user profile.  (There was no way around this, I had to create a profile and give it a password, which sucks, I'm not big on home security, I have nothing to hide and have pretty competent and non-malicious roommates.  Then the Wow started.  The Welcome screen literally melted away, no fading or transitioning.  It melted.  I thought it was so cool.  Aero Glass was in full swing on my little AGP system, which I was seriously doubtful about.  Thankfully my 512MB X1600Pro was up to the challenge, and not once did my screen flicker or stall on desktop animations, not a single one.  Not on the icons animations, not on the transparencies, the genie affects, the Flip 3D, the disappearing windows, it was all magnificent.  Microsoft definitely put their time in the UI.  I put the DVD back in and did a clean install over the current Vista.  Another 45 minutes passed.  At least it was kinda consistent.
  
  Then I actually dug in and became less and less impressed.  See, while my Video card was gleefully playing around with all the new toys, my audio card told me to cram it, it wasn't doing anything.  I remembered hearing something about Creative getting a little laggy on Vista drivers for its Sound Blaster cards, but I thought at least there was a software solution in Windows that would soft-generate some sounds till I got hardware running.  Not at all.  Not only that, Vista didn't even detect my big flash Audigy 2 ZS Platinum.  That piece of kit is still $180 on Newegg, I thought it would at least have some type of generic detection in Vista.  Nuh uh.  I hopped into IE7, which was freaking quick in Vista, and jumped over to Creatives page to download what they called their final release Vista 32 drivers.  After a quick install and not so quick (3minute) reboot, still nothing, no detection or nothing.  So I went back to Creative's page and hit up their forums to read that the final drivers from Creative were actually rebundled beta drivers, and that the beta's were better, so I got them instead.  They actually gave me audio, kinda.  Every second I hear popping and whirring and skipping and cracking.  At first I thought my audio was tied to my mouse, cuz it seemed every time I moved it, it would crackle and pop.  That wasn't the case. I read on the forums that Windows is actually capable of generating the audio signal faster than the Audigy, and the crackling was the result of the audio card catching up.  Bummer.  I thought that with the delay I put into it, surely within a couple of days a new batch would be released and the problem solved.  Then I saw the release date on the fresh drivers.   They were released March 9, the day before I installed Vista.  Things weren't looking so good.  But I pressed on.
  
  I loaded up Counterstrike: Source.  When it finished copying over from my backup drive, I fired it up and joined a server.  It was awful.  Frame rates were up, but I was getting packet loss up in the 20s and choke between 50-100, and then the audio stalls.  It stalled so hard at times I would hang for seconds at a time.  The normals in the server were kind enough to ask if I was having troubles today before they knifed me in the back.  I told them I was testing Vista.  What sounds I heard after that were nothing but laughs and "Vista sucks #$&^@#$!!!"  I told them I was still working on it and I'd be back later.
  
  I dropped out of CS:S and brought up the task manager.  Much to my joy I thought I had found the answer to my stalling troubles.  It seems that even though I had closed out counterstrike Windows still had 956MB of my 1GB of RAM cached up.  I heard rumors of it being a memory hog, but c'mon, 934MB/1024 and all I have running is the OS?  I decided the next step for me was to get a memory, which I had been so longing to do for a while anyway to increase the buffer on my Lightwave renderings.
  
  I tossed in another GB of Kingston DDR PC3200, (cuz I am still running a Clawhammer AMD64 and AGP) and fired it up.  But it was all for naught as I saw Vista eat 1635 MB of my newly acquired 2GB.  WHY?!  I did some research.  Turns out Vista handles memory a little differently than XP.  Vista caches a lot of instruction sets of all kinds of programs and files so that there is no waiting.  Some guy in a forum made the mention of him being glad he has no free memory, cuz its being wasted that way.  I started to understand and found a little relief in it.  I did notice that all my programs were starting almost instantly, including Photoshop CS2  which I put on after the RAM upgrade.  How awesome is it to see Photoshop CS2 start in 4 seconds?  Pretty sweet, lemme tell ya.  Sadly, everything else went pretty slowly.  working on a 800x600, 72 dpi background image left me waiting as I applied simple sharpen filters, almost 25 seconds.  So I quit that and began working up my next hypothesis to being draggy, which turned out to be true.
  
  I opened FutureMark 05 and gave it a run.  I kid you not, my CPU tests scored only a 325 in Vista.  I have a severely dated CPU, my lowly AMD 64 +3200 2.0Ghz, (not 2.2 like the ones you find now, and its single-core.) and it has finally found its limit.  Well, as long as my computer is sitting there silently browsing web pages, it is fine.  But in previous threads I have mentioned that my machine will be built for gaming and media, not coding or merely surfing, and to sit idle is simply unacceptable, not matter how pretty it is while it does that.  Thats why I have a cool case.
  
  That was a longer story than I thought.  Anyway, my computer is too slow to run Vista, paralyzed from the neck up I guess.  That's ok, I found a floppy drive in one of the little closets in the house that Brad left behind when he moved out, and it worked, so I have a fresh and squeaky clean XP install on my big black box, and it is happily booting in 24 seconds, running 85 fps on HDR maps like dust in Counterstrike, blasting my hard rock music and ripping my blockbuster collection till the cows come home, (should cows and counterstrike be in the same sentence?)
  
  One day, when I get the nerve to do some command line computing, I'll put Ubuntu on it and dual-boot to stay sane.
  
  *I am not a professional software reviewer, so I take no responsibility for the incompleteness of my review.  Feel free to comment.
  
  PS, I got my wish list box under $1K