Personal experience of vista x64

I receive a copy of vista ultimate thru my employer about 3 months ago and never installed base on reviews, forums, blogs, etc.

Yesterday, I said how bad it can possible be, worst than 95? Me? 98 ?, I mean come on every time there is a new windows release even Linux there is a few quirks that ALWAYS needs to be take care of, and Linux user don’t come here and say that you just installed xyz distro and EVERYTHING worked right after 1st reboot with out opening script windows, users permissions, drivers, etc.

Therefore, I went ahead and download the appropriate drivers, mobo (nforce4), video (7300gt), printer (ip4300), and audio (realtek ' 97). I ghost my current xp setup "just in case" something "bad" happened and could restore my pc in less than 15min. so put my DVD in restart pc, change bios to start from DVD, DVD started ask me if I wanted to make a fresh install, selected yes, selected region, keyboard, time zone, and done in aprox 15-20 min I was booting into vista, I'm single user so selected auto logon, so I went lets see what’s broken, only my audio didn't install (its weird that ac '97 drivers didn't install since they are probably included in 90% of motherboards out there).

Installed latest drivers for mobo then reboot, then video and reboot, audio and reboot. I even rebooted when software did not demanded. so far everything working fine, aero its ok vista index 4.9 (supposable good), so I'm ok what’s all the "fuss" about, let's try some x86 app to break it, installed winamp 2.95 installed just fine music plays thru speakers nothing hangs, opened 8 different instances of winamp all playing different mp3s in 2 separate hard drives and no glitches no skipping, so I'm like what is broken in here ?, lets tried to keep breaking this thing, installed vista x64 codec pack (you know how codec’s pack can mess up windozes) all my media play perfectly, lets keep trying to break this thing, installed office 97 same thing all working, all loaded all software that I have and only 1 didn’t install (diskeeper 10) said it's not compatible with my vista version (ultimate) ?? Why go figure, I even authored a DVD using DVD author (comandline app) and worked.

So I thinking what's all that "bad" talking about vista, I have been using computers since my precious Tandy-radio shack trs-80, all the x86 way up to sun systems. All windows flavors and some linuxes (redhat, fedora, caldera, suse, ubuntu, kubunto, dsl, knoppix, etc) and so far this as been same as every os. actually I did experience a problem and I couldn’t install latest flash player directly with activex control (I lowered my security setting and still refuse to install) so I had to download the offline installer and problem solve, actually I feel kind of safe that the activex control didn’t install even with my security setting all the way down.

Again, this is my personal experience, so far, ok. As I said as every os, requires sometime to tweak and setup every setting as you like.

Software proven to work in vista x64:
Convertx to DVD
Nero
Dvdfab HD
DVD author
Audacity
Winamp 2.95 (yes it works, yes I know there is a new version out there)
Ccleaner
Utorrent
Avg free
7zip
Office 97

Edit:
I'm not a gamer, so I cant speak about games, I do have some old games (quake II) and some other that came with old video cards (comandos ?), age of empires I, II, will try those tomorrow.

Congrats on the install and flawless work so far. One program that I've had issues with is quicktime. Maybe they released a newer revision but its bad causing crashes most of the time in the OS. So just be warned with that software if you install it and use it.

i have vista business on my machine at home (HTPC) and ive had no issues so far, my opteron and my 2 gigs of ram feed vista plenty


one real major issue ive had so far was GBPVR not setup correctly, however, i have since corrected these issues. (mainly ZAP2IT not functioning and me having to import or try to import xmltv settings) which btw failed on me ... and screwed up my channel line.

My experience is largely similar. I installed several old games on mine, and found very few that didn't work. Usually, the only problem was the UAC which is in fact, awful. Luckily you can turn it off.

It was not as smooth a release as XP in my opinion, but a worthy successor. I really like the aero interface. Emulating DX9 on a DX10 OS is going to cause some performance hits, and it's got a steep hardware requirement, but overall, once dual/quad cores become the norm, and all games are dx10... no one is going to complain too loudly.

Another convert to the true path.

As the OP points out, there is always going to be some trials and tribulations with a new operating system, but the furore over Vista is reaching epidemic levels. I have found it works flawlessly, the only time it crashed (and BSOD) was when I accidentally tried installing sound drivers, twice, at the same time. Last time I screwed up a driver install it was XP and I had to reinstall but nope, reboot and straight back in to Vista.

As for performance, yeah, you can be worried if you're 500 points lower in 3dmark, but only if you have such a rubbish system you were only scoring 1000 anyway!

Awesome jrafael!

In my findings, I had no issues whatsoever, compared to the far more numerous issues with XP, 98SE, etc. etc.

DanFraser said:

Another convert to the true path.

As the OP points out, there is always going to be some trials and tribulations with a new operating system, but the furore over Vista is reaching epidemic levels. I have found it works flawlessly, the only time it crashed (and BSOD) was when I accidentally tried installing sound drivers, twice, at the same time. Last time I screwed up a driver install it was XP and I had to reinstall but nope, reboot and straight back in to Vista.

As for performance, yeah, you can be worried if you're 500 points lower in 3dmark, but only if you have such a rubbish system you were only scoring 1000 anyway!

Click to expand...

Yes! Another convert. Sure, any new OS is going to have issues. But the people that say stay away from 64-bit for games ( not true ) and all this stuff... they must either have garbage pc's with old outdated components and 512k ram, or they installed vista 64-bit when it first came out and never tried it since.

Morvak said:

or they installed vista 64-bit when it first came out and never tried it since.

Click to expand...

More like tried it in the beta stage or RC stage when the 64-bit edition wasn't that great off. Less than 2 weeks after release I've been running 64-bit edition on my main PC as main OS. So if there was any issues between release and 2 weeks later they cleared them up vary fast.

I enjoy it also, the only things I have problems with are minor glitches here and there. The self extractor for a new Intel bios wouldn't work within the OS but winrar extracted the .exe fine so I got past that. I have a crashing bug within my game counter-strike source, but I just removed my modified heapsize and added a -32bit command to the launch parameters and that bug is now gone.

Other than that I get a few small bugs here and there but they are all fixable when they pop up.

Hmm sounds intriguing... Anyone willing to donate a copy of Vista x64 version... you know *ahem* for reviewing purposes only... jk Hopefully soon I'll be picking up a copy.