OT: Vista

[Insomnia]

Hmmm.

I've just recently installed Vista Home Premium onto my laptop and although it looks very pretty, my machine has slowed right down.

Bottleneck seems to be graphics performance (built in gfx using ram for video memory). Now I clicked on activate so the OEM version I have is activated. I would like to take it off and slap XP back on, however, having activated Vista am I now screwed if I want to sell it on?

Could it not be possible to go down the route of telephone activation (when it detects equipment not same) and say the machine has been upgraded?

 

[Buzz]

Vista is a total bitch on the system memory. i have 1gb and its no longer enough. never mind playing games like Battlefield2 !
I've installed a 1Gb readyboost module to try and help, in case it was struggling with paging stuff onto the HDD, then i'll get around to fitting that extra 1gb when i can afford it. in 2 months minimum i'm guessing, as Junes salary is pretty much earmarked for stuff already, and i've spend most of this months wages already!

 

[Alan]

Selling it on will be no problem at all, you can activate it up to 3 times online... Everytime i go to reload Windows XP Pro I use a serial number off a genuine machine and activate over the phone lol

 

[Darren]

Once an OEM is activated it is locked to that motherboard basically, so no you can't sell it on I'm afraid.
I have the Ultimate version (all paid for OEM versions) on two PC's x32 on the P4, & x64 on the 4400 x2 and to me it doesn't seem any slower than the old XP in either 32bit or 64bit.
BF2142 hasn't slowed down any for me at all on the 64bit one but that might have something to do with the 8800GTX clocked to 620MHz/2.1GHz and the 2Gig of RAM sat in that.

 

[Bill]

There's a lot of speculation that Vista uses a lot of memory and therefore performance suffers.

I have read that Vista appears to use so much RAM because it uses it in a much more efficient way than it was used in previous versions of Windows. It treats all the RAM like a cache, and stores as much in it as possible, so if it is needed again it can be accessed quickly. If extra memory is needed for an application it will throw away some of the info in the RAM it was holding but doesn't currently need. It does this because memory not used in a cache is wasted memory.

 

[Darren]

Exactly what I was told & because of it loading of my most used apps appear to be near instant. It is great having lots & lots of RAM but surely it's a complete waste if it isn't actually being used. After all it takes a lot less than a blink of an eye for the system to dump stuff held in RAM that it no longer needs.

 

[Ian]

Alan, same here..

Press 1 if you've activated this product on more than one PC.

"2" "2" "2" "2" "2" "2".

Thank you. Your entry was sucessful. LOL.

 

[Bill]

Exactly, it's just more efficient memory management.

The memory companies are exploiting this by advertising that if you have Vista you automatically need more RAM.

Granted there will be a drop in performance trying to run the fancy graphics in Vista, but just turn them off if you don't want them.

I remember the day I got XP turning the theme back to Windows Classic so that my machine ran a bit quicker.

 

[Insy]

What doesn't make sense is that vista has given aero a performance rating of 2 but gaming performance of 2.7!

 

[Wimmy]

Some of the figures have confused the crap out of me too. Mine was quite low on the gaming rating. I now have a 512mb XFX 7600GS card and still only have a 3.7 on gaming graphics! (my lowest score for ratings)

Everything else is approaching 5 on my system

 

[Darren]

The overall rating you get goes by what ever your lowest score was in the individual tests.
My x2 4400 scores like this:
Processor 5.0
Memory 5.2
Graphics 5.9
Gaming Graphics 5.9
Primary Hard Disk 5.9
I have a final Windows experience figure of 5.0 due to the CPU letting the side down.

 

[Wimmy]

But I cant understand why I got such a low score for a 512 mb card!

 

[Darren]

Have you installed nVidia's latest drivers or are you running the ones that installed with Vista?
My P4 PC has an overclocked 7900GT in it & it rates as 5.9 for desktop & 5.6 for gaming. The 7600 compared to this has half of the number of pipelines & therefore will be somewhat down on power, the 512MB will have helped with the score a little though but not by much.

 

[Wimmy .]

- yip I got the nvidia drivers.

Any idea what score I should be looking at for this card?

 

[Darren]

Actually a lot of people with your card report getting around 4.7 for both desktop & gaming.

 

[Wimmy]

Will double check on my score when I get home. (At office at mo on XP)

 

[Insy]

Another thing i've noticed is that when i'm running 2 screens, things slow down even further! Not by much but when you click and drag items its noticeable. Very wierd. Never had that in xp.