My opinions on Vista SP1, 8 months later..

2StepSteve · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:52

What an irratating thread to read this has been, so much so I skipped a couple of pages. Too many people dishing out personal preferences on what they like then waffling on and arguing about why they are right.. Lets have some useful unbiased info, more benchmarks would do nicely don't we all think?

I'm interested in how vista has been coming along with gaming performance. I came across these tests from May 2007, are things still this bad? http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMzNCwzLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

dirtydog · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:53

Robert said:
Who called DD an idiot?

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=11022782&postcount=52
http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=11022812&postcount=55

Burnsy2023 · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:53

dirtydog said:
Hmm, dunno about you but I can double click on an icon pretty quickly Photoshop takes some time to load. The only way Vista can 'appear' to load it quicker is if it prefetches it before the desktop comes up, which would in effect be smoke and mirrors.

Yes, but how many people actually wait for the desktop to load and then immediatly load a program? I don't, I usually am in the middle of doing something and take a minute or two to actually start using the PC.

Burnsy

Robert · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:54

dirtydog said:
Hmm, dunno about you but I can double click on an icon pretty quickly Photoshop takes some time to load. The only way Vista can 'appear' to load it quicker is if it prefetches it before the desktop comes up, which would in effect be smoke and mirrors.

DD could you please e-mail me as I want to explain something you (from earlier in the thread), which isn't particularly relevant to this thread (e-mail should be in trust).

If not, nevermind.

NathanE · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:54

dirtydog said:
Yes I understand that much, but supposing you start a machine from a cold start. Clearly Vista cannot possibly get any program into RAM quicker than XP because it is dependent upon the performance of the storage device, usually a HDD.

Cold starts are rare on Vista. The default shut down method on Vista is "hibernate" which will also store all the Superfetch state...

But if you did do a cold start - yes it will need to pull it all back into RAM. This can take about 30-60 minutes depending on how much RAM you've got to fill.

Alternatively you can buy a USB memory stick and setup Vista's ReadyBoost on that.

Burnsy2023 · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:54

dirtydog said:
Snip

DD, stick the discussion. There is no need to troll or antagonise.

Burnsy

Final8y · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:55

NathanE said:
Icons have always been like that. .ICO is just a container for the same icon but in lots of different sizes. In Vista they basically added loads of "big" versions of the icons to each .ICO. So that when you scale the view they get bigger and actually look even better and more detailed.

Damn i hoped it was something more fancy like geometry

Richdog · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:55

Does ReadyBoost make a noticeable difference?

dirtydog · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:55

Burnsy2023 said:
DD ... There is no need to troll or antagonise.

Burnsy

I am not intending to do either of those things.

Burnsy2023 · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:56

Richdog said:
Does ReadyBoost make a noticeable difference?

Depends how much paging you have to do, so it really helps on machines with less RAM or hard drives that are fragmented or have slow access times.

Burnsy

Robert · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:57

Richdog said:
Does ReadyBoost make a noticeable difference?

Not that I know of. I think Feek said that once you get to 2gb of RAM you don't notice its presence.

Final8y · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:57

2StepSteve said:
What an irratating thread to read this has been, so much so I skipped a couple of pages. Too many people dishing out personal preferences on what they like then waffling on and arguing about why they are right.. Lets have some useful unbiased info, more benchmarks would do nicely don't we all think?

I'm interested in how vista has been coming along with gaming performance. I came across these tests from May 2007, are things still this bad? http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTMzNCwzLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

No lol.

marscay · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:57

Richdog said:
Does ReadyBoost make a noticeable difference?

i could tell the difference on a laptop with 1gb.

Burnsy2023 · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:58

I wonder if FatRakoon has finished his benchmarks?

Burnsy

NathanE · 3 Feb 2008 at 14:59

Final8y said:
Damn i hoped it was something more fancy like geometry

Actually you may be right. I seem to recall that Vista would have "vector" icons. Not sure if that got cut in the Longhorn Reset or not.

Either way, each size would have its own vector rendition. Because vector art doesn't scale well on icons because icons have to look good at all sizes and simply linearly scaling them can cause readability issues especially once they get down to 32x32 and 16x16.

NathanE · 3 Feb 2008 at 15:00

Robert said:
Not that I know of. I think Feek said that once you get to 2gb of RAM you don't notice its presence.

You do notice on a cold start - with any amount of RAM.

As the USB drive can maintain a persistent Superfetch store.

I was going to get one even though I have 4GB of RAM. But to be honest I have rebooted my PC about 5 times? since I built it a year ago!

Final8y · 3 Feb 2008 at 15:01

Thats the one "Vector"

Robert · 3 Feb 2008 at 15:05

To use readyboost do you need to format the flash drive?

I have a corsair flash voyager which I may try it on (presuming the drive will work as a readyboosy device).

NathanE · 3 Feb 2008 at 15:06

Robert said:
To use readyboost do you need to format the flash drive?

I have a corsair flash voyager which I may try it on (presuming the drive will work as a readyboosy device).

You don't need to format it or even keep it clean. When you setup ReadyBoost it will ask how much space on the USB stick you want to allocate. So you can retain a portion for your own files.

TheVoice · 3 Feb 2008 at 15:09

marscay said:
if i was talking about minimum required i could have said 512mb, but i stated the OS sweet spot which IS 4gb. gaming with 2gb in Vista is like 1gb under XP ...not enjoyable.

That's quite an exaggeration; I'm running Vista with 2GB and gaming is absolutely fine, and that's running at decent resolutions (often 1680x1050) and high detail levels.

That's not to say 4GB isn't going to be better still, but 2GB certainly isn't only adequate for "light usage".