teh Forum

Weeeeeee!!!!!!!! It will be here tomorrow. I have a lot of prep-work to do for the upgrade (as in moving important data off of my C: drive, etc. All of my hardware (except on pro-audio interface,) is directly supported now. I've decided to run the 64bit version. It doesn't have a few WOW functions that I will miss a bit, but other than that everything about it is better. It's supposed to perform 15-30% better per thread in games that will support it (over 32 bit,) etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, I'll post after I get it set up.

Yeah I would love to hear some solid 32 vs 64 impressions. I am trying to decide which one to go with myself.

Driver support?

Actual benefits?

What features aren't included with 64?

There is more or less no reason to go with 32 if:

1. You have hardware that has signed drivers created for it.
2. (this one is based on something I read a while back) You don't need to run in the virtual X86 environment (to run things like VDMSound, or the special tricks people use to get DOS games running in XP without using full emulators.
3. You have a 64 bit CPU.

Number 2 is a difficult one for me, but I'm going to go ahead and give it up for the extra performance, and future-proofing. (I plan to add another 2GB RAM to my system in the near future.) A few games have added support for 64 bit CPUs in the form of extra detail (since they can squeeze out a little more performance, (Far Cry, UT2004, and Riddick for example,)) and I see that trend growing as time goes on. More cores and more memory are the way of things for the near future anyway. May as well run the OS that takes advantage of most of it to a degree.

I don't think there is any one thing that stands out and says "USE ME BECAUSE OF THIS!" but all the little things might add up at some point. I'm tossing 64 bit Vista on the main box tomorrow (time permitting,) so I'll report then. I have some big files coming down right now, so I may wait until they're done. (which could take up to two more days)

grats, it's a good OS (i feel sort of proud I guess since I worked on it), although my portion won't be realized until server is released.

64 is the way to go if you have all the equipment. Everything will be switching soon anways, you'll be a bit a head of most people but big deal.

I worked on the USB stack for a while, back when the OS was a piece of trash.

Stupid files are still transferring... Haven't installed yet... Bleh...

It's installed, but I'm not using it...

You're wasting it!!!!


Anyway, it didn't support my wireless device, so I switched to another one, and just got the driver this morning, so I should have a fully functional copy of Vista X64 this evening. The wireless device was the only thing that I had trouble finding a driver for.

It seems to me that at the time of an OS release, there should be non-beta drivers available for all major hardware. I don't have a single non-beta driver (aside from anything that shipped with Vista.)

I shall report back once I have my drivers installed.

Everything is working now. Vista is nice. I haven't played any games on it yet, or tried anything audio related, but all the basic bits are quite cool. I'll post after I've tried some gamery pokery.

J3RK wrote:It seems to me that at the time of an OS release, there should be non-beta drivers available for all major hardware.

This sentiment is certainly echoing through the halls of the internet.

I will install sometime in the next month but I am not in any dire hurry. Let us know as you make further observations.

Well, so far it's working extremely well. Fast, responsive, etc. There are a few slightly annoying things, which hopefully can be disabled. There are multiple confirmations when deleting most files. So far, everything I have run on it works fine. If something didn't, I would first assume it was beta-driver related, then Vista. I like Aero. I thought I'd like it for a minute, then switch to "Windows Classic" style. So far I've kept it running. All of their visual gimmickry is fairly non-intrusive, so there wouldn't be much point in turning it off. It kind of reminds me of OSX (some things being cooler, some being similar, and some being cheap rip-offs) My audio software seems to work pretty well. Anyway, not bad so far...

many windows are open...

windows+tab...mouse scroll...

Wow. I don't know if it's Vista, the latest CVS build of DOSBox, or both, but I can run System Shock in 640x480 in DOSBox VERY quickly. It works perfectly. No audio stuttering, quick update, (though not quite a smooth as using the XP32 hacked method.) Now I can use DOSBox for absolutely all of my DOS needs. Frabjous Day!!!!

Yeehaw! Got Dream Scenes installed. I've got an avi-loop that I appropriated from a demo as my desktop background. It's a little disorienting, but quite cool. Good thing there is a pause function for it.

That'll be nice. Aside from making the footprint smaller, is there anything of interest?

Quite a bit of stuff, although nothing really essential.

http://www.istartedsomething.com/200712 ... changelog/