What is your Vista niggle?

the-void

the-void

the-void

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I purchased a couple of Vista books over the weekend. (Windows Vista: The Missing Manual and Office, O'Reilly and Windows Vista Administrator Pocket Consultant, Microsoft). After using XP for half a decade I suppose you become set in your ways. However after a weekend session with Vista and these books I feel I have finally found the true depth and breadth of Vista. I would like for this thread not to turn into a mindless knocking of Vista. But rather an outlet for that one thing that prevents you completely from giving up XP. Its like getting a bit of grit in your iced bun. The bun is still nice, but the experience of the grit has let prevented total satisfaction.

My niggle. My bit of grit. Is gaming on Vista. I have installed the Retail drivers from nVidia. And its still slower than it was on XP. I remember all the threads about saying it will all be ok when the drivers come out of Beta. Well, it didn't happen. I am not even sure if nVidia are ever going write decent Vista drivers, ever. The cynical part of me thinks poor DX9 performance in Vista is going to drive DX10 card uptake. I can understand fully why they are doing it, they are a business after all. Still, its a downer. Not so long ago I was singing the praises of XP, and now that I want to kick it into touch its lingering around like a bad smell. Typical.
 
Well, in nvidia's eyes, Vista hasn't even been released yet so the only drivers we have available are not very good ones. The Forceware 100 series which only works on PCI-E cards is apparantly quite close to XP drivers for speed and IQ, but again these are only in BETA but should go live on the 'official' Vista release date.
 
There are going to be plenty of niggles at this point.

Lack of good driver support, some programs are a bit picky about working, activation on OEM is dodgy, to name but a few.

One thing that really gets my back up is the price of the Retail version. I know it's a product with a long life cycle (probably around 4-5 years) but I really don't see the need to make it 2.5x the price of OEM. 1.5-2x would have been far more appropriate.
 
Give Vista a few months to gain momentum. Companies are going to be kicked in to creating new drivers etc so support will start to get better over time. Remember, Vista isn't really even out until Tuesday officially. :D

My one niggle so far is the fact that I bought Vista Home Premium for my 64 bit cpu only to find out that only the 32 bit dvd was included! Still, that will be sorted next tuesday when the website to order the 64bit comes online...
 
BlizzardX said:
Well, in nvidia's eyes, Vista hasn't even been released yet so the only drivers we have available are not very good ones. The Forceware 100 series which only works on PCI-E cards is apparantly quite close to XP drivers for speed and IQ, but again these are only in BETA but should go live on the 'official' Vista release date.
Click to expand...


I want you to be right BlizzardX, I really do. But it doesn't look that way.
Where does it say they are BETA on the nVidia website?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_97.46.html

Windows Vista x86 RTM

ForceWare Release 95
Version: 97.46
Release Date: January 5, 2007
WHQL Driver
 
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my 'niggle' is that pressing F6 in an explorer window doesn't take focus of the address bar :mad:

-anyone know how to force classic address bar?
 
My biggest annoyance is that Windows STILL seems to randomly decide what it wants to do with folder layouts etc. I tried sorting it out today and then found out my C: had been 'customised' for music files, with album/artist/genre etc. all dotted along one of the menu bars, when there wasn't a single audio file in sight.
 
bledd. said:
my 'niggle' is that pressing F6 in an explorer window doesn't take focus of the address bar :mad:

-anyone know how to force classic address bar?
Click to expand...

Alt+D will take focus of the address bar. And you can still use the old classic xxx/yyy notation.

The new address bar is far better in my humble opinion. Breadcrumbs, and clickable too. Click on the tiny > option to bring a list of folders. No more clicking back to get to the folder you want.
 
Nismo said:
My biggest annoyance is that Windows STILL seems to randomly decide what it wants to do with folder layouts etc. I tried sorting it out today and then found out my C: had been 'customised' for music files, with album/artist/genre etc. all dotted along one of the menu bars, when there wasn't a single audio file in sight.
Click to expand...

:p exactly what i had today...very annoying. How hard can it be to code it to pickup the filetypes within a folder and give it the relevant layout!?
 
the-void said:
I want you to be right BlizzardX, I really do. But it doesn't look that way.
Where does it say they are BETA on the nVidia website?

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_97.46.html

Windows Vista x86 RTM

ForceWare Release 95
Version: 97.46
Release Date: January 5, 2007
WHQL Driver
Click to expand...
Indeed their not. If you look at the version number, you'll see that these are only 97.46 where as the ones which are performing well are version 100.3 or something similar...

Infact this thread here may help until the official drivers are out

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17685078
 
Nice BlizzardX, nice. I was hoping for something like this. Those drivers are worse than the standard MS drivers that come with Vista! I honestly couldn't believe it when I installed them. (They even keep crashing!)
 
Haha they're much better than the BETA 1 drivers trust me! They where awful! Just using the 100.53's at the moment and they appear to be quite good.. A little bit of the pace in terms of 3Dmark but I'm gonna try them in some games shortly.
 
BlizzardX said:
Haha they're much better than the BETA 1 drivers trust me! They where awful! Just using the 100.53's at the moment and they appear to be quite good.. A little bit of the pace in terms of 3Dmark but I'm gonna try them in some games shortly.
Click to expand...

Gutted. Just tried those new drivers. Still the same. Admittedly this is still Oblivion I was testing with. Still averaging around 17-20fps. Sometimes dropping to 11-12fps, something that never happens under XP.

Personally I don't think we are ever going to get the same DX9 performance under Vista as XP. At least not with DX9 cards.

Still, all is not lost. I am migrating to Vista for primary use, and I will be dual booting a nLited XP partition to run my DX9 games. As soon as I get a DX10 card then it will be bye bye XP.
 
Any little niggles I had or any little niggles i thought i might have, have all worked out perfectly.

Lets see, I had a brief problem with wireless networking. If my connection dropped it seemed to not automaticlly reconnect. But thats all sorted now and hasnt done it since.

Battery life, lots of scary talk about drasticlly reduced battery life. Well yes it is reduced but ive gone from a little over 3 hours to 2.5-2.75hrs which is accpetable to me.

Azureus didnt work, but found uTorrent which i didnt know was what azureus was based on so thats a perfect replacement.

Also i was foolishly getting really really annoyed with the User access account thing, where it asked you to confirm every little thing. Then i figured how to turn that off (i didnt have any of the betas) and all was sweet again.

Al and all everything is runing smooth and i was genearlly impressed by it and very pleased with the decision to switch over to it. Love my little notebook running it and happy enough with the 3.4 user index score. Not bad for a 12.1in little notebook.
 
my niggle would be having to re-learn doing simple things that have changed since XP, like add/remove programs have been moved to a different submenu under control panel etc etc.

oh and the fact that the media center doesnt like ts media streams where my MCE install plays them fine. thats annoying!

having said that, i do like the overall look of vista though, nice and shiny looking! :)
 
I'm getting irritated that theres no option to go up a folder when browsing through files/folders. Anyone know if theres a way to turn this back on?
 
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