Vista anyone?

+=TP=+Hamelin · Vista anyone?

As you all probably know, Vista hits the shelves in January. Are any of you going to risk it or just stay with good 'ol XP?

I will be lucky/unlucky enough to have an opportunity to put it on my system by the end of this month.

Wish me luck!

+=TP=+Disturbed1

Im going to stick with XP until i can afford to upgrade my system to run vista and directx 10.

+=TP=+ Farslain

Will buy Home Premium the day it is released. But will stick a new drive in my system to install it on, if all goes well and all my games and programs are mostly working I'll keep it as my main OS, if not I'll go XP until it's worth it.

From running Vista RC2 extensively 90% of my stuff worked fine, the other 10% either had driver problems stopping it from working or driver problems making me lose performance. This isn't Microsofts fault but the manufacturer of the items not producing drivers before release (kinda understandable).

+=TP=+Seargent Stu(admin)

As a regular installer/upgrader, I would say wait for the first service pack before purchasing, as this normally has all the rollups for the pain the first wave have purchasers have experienced.

Also I would suggest having dual boot via partition magic so you can swap between XP and Vista for any unexpected issues.

+=TP=+Hamelin

Yeah nice idea Stu, I like Farslain's idea of a new hard drive to put it on, if everything goes Pete Tong you can just swap hard drives back to XP again.

Edit: Having thought about it for more than 30 seconds, won't swapping hard drives cause conflicts with the registering process? Essentially you'll be registering identical machines (except the hard drive) which could cause problems?

+=TP=+wombat8

Hey! Does anyone know if Vista creates any problems with 2142? If it does I won't get it.

+=TP=+ Farslain

2142 runs fine on Vista.

And Hamelin I already answered your question in TS so wont repeat it heh.

Need your address to post you a hard drive though, can mail me at ryanglnnon@hotmail.com

+=TP=+wombat8

Vista seems to look good but how much will it be- the improvement need to be worth the money.

+=TP=+Seargent Stu(admin)

expert edition will be over 200 notes i am afraid.

upgracdes likely to be around 130

home pro version expected around 130
no upgrade version planned at this time.

however microshite doing free upgrades via system builders for all new pc's shipped with xp pro at the moment.

One thing that really pi*&^s me off about microsoft is that they do not really care about the home consumer, if they did, they would charge around 30 notes fot the software, which would be worthwhile paying, as it is they loose money as ppl are not prepared to pay that sort of cash for an OS.

+=TP=+ Farslain

Pricing:

It may change a little, but not much.

Home Basic £120
Home Premium £150
Business £180
Ultimate £230

Worth noting is that these are full prices, expect OEM's in the brown boxes designed for system builders and bought from places like OcUK to cost less (ex. Win XP Pro SP2 is £97, but Microsofts listed price for this is quite a bit more).

Upgrade costs from XP to Vista seem to be around 50% of the cost listed above for the Basic going up to 60% as you reach Ultimate. Which overall isn't too bad. I don't recomend buying XP Pro now to upgrade to Vista in January, you'll end up paying more.

At participating vendors if you buy a new PC between October 26, 2006 until March 15, 2007 you will recieve a free upgrade coupon. Just be weary if buying a new pre built system, the vendors aren't overly happy with this scheme as the smart ones realise they are losing sales early next year on OS upgrades and as such may increase the cost of their systems a little to cover this. (i've seen two vendors go up in price in the last 2 weeks and that's without actively looking)

OS selection:

For the average gamer/user Home offers too little. Business and Ultimate are useless. Just more bloat, more stuff to trim off and clutter your drive and increase your comit charge -making an already resource hungry OS want more.

Home Premium is perfect in features. Think of this as the XP Pro of the Vista world.

Performance:

Right now Vista is about 10% slower in every game on average. Below is a short list of the games I bench marked at maxed out settings compared on both.

First number is XP, second is Vista.

2142 | 198fps | 172
Flight Sim X Demo | 39 | 33
Oblivion | 98 | 87
Graw | 112 | 91

The main reason for the performance difference is down to two things. Firstly OS maturity, XP has been around ages making for tighter programming. And even though Vista holds much of the same core Xp programming it also adds a great deal more to the OS meaning more resources are being used.
Secondly is drivers, as the GPU vendors produce 3-4 more versions and refine them accordinly you'll see the gap lessen, and by the time we're all on DX10 cards under Vista the gap should go the other way by a decent margin.

Worth getting?:

For most users probably not, if it isn't broken, don't fix it. If you can game and are happy under XP right now then wait a little.

If you have plans on a new G80 from Nvidia or R600 from ATI/AMD then you have little choice as you won't get DX10 into any other OS legally or easily.

Vista is the future, it looks lovely and runs beautifully if you have the hardware.

But don't think for one second that XP doesn't have years left in it yet, you can hold off upgrading until need overtakes want at no detriment to your gaming.

+=TP=+Sire_eriS

im going to wait,both stue and farslain have it spot on. no need to upgrade yet and theres a performance penalty at present. I need better reasons to spend money Very Happy

+=TP=+ Farslain

Waiting is never a bad idea. SP1 is always a good starting stage.

Infact:

http://apcmag.com/5098/microsoft_kick_starts_vista_sp1