To Vista or not to Vista ?

[epicstruggle]

I haven't had any headaches with unsigned drivers and Vista-64. Which items do you need to run that only provide unsigned drivers?

Same here. Everything Ive thrown at it has worked from the get go.

 

[PARANOiA]

I haven't had any headaches with unsigned drivers and Vista-64. Which items do you need to run that only provide unsigned drivers?

For a start, my Canon scanner, <12 months old has no 64-bit drivers. A quick check on the Canon site tells me that's still the case. That's on the work/no-work side. My Logitech MX3200 had no native Vista support on last install, meaning I also lost my media buttons. It looks like this has since been fixed.

Plus various bits of software which require their own drivers often perform a little wonkily - I believe Acrobat Pro was one of them, and it couldn't install its print-to-PDF functionality, however I'll be honest and say it's been a while since I jumped into the 64-bit version. That (and all the others I hit upon) may have since been resolved.

Overall the benefits of 64-bit (a questionable speed boost on the rare occasion I happened to be using a >2gb photoshop image) didn't really outweigh the general PITA that was disabled or crippled hardwre. That's a personal opinion, of course, and would love to be proved otherwise... of course no two hardware setups are the same, so it's hard to make me feel confident after a few negative experiences.

 

[V3]

Overall the benefits of 64-bit (a questionable speed boost on the rare occasion I happened to be using a >2gb photoshop image) didn't really outweigh the general PITA that was disabled or crippled hardwre. That's a personal opinion, of course, and would love to be proved otherwise... of course no two hardware setups are the same, so it's hard to make me feel confident after a few negative experiences.

So the new Photoshop has 64 bit version ? I've been waiting for Adobe to have 64 bit Photoshop.

 

[swaaye]

Go XP! Fastar and teh bettar!

Seriously. Skipping thru videos seems MUCH snappier in XP. And my 1 Gb LAN sees probably 2x faster throughput in XP. But hey, don't take my word for it. Obviously if you want Direct3D 10 Vista is the only way to go. And only seeing 3.5 GB RAM in XP kinda sucks (XP x64 has issues with 4 GB + Audigy 2)

As for the Vista x64 factor, it's kinda useful to say the least if you have 4+ GB RAM. But that is absolutely it, as far as I can tell, for discernible tangible benefits.

 

[Mortimer]

I went with Vista a year ago, and NOTHING could make me go back to XP.

It's just better. Nuff said!

 

[woundingchaney]

Been running Vista x64 since release and honestly havent had too many issues (although some initial driver complications from Nvidia and Creative come to mind). Game performance seems slightly worse than Xp in most titles but absolutely nothing that would cause me to switch back to Xp or even boot in Xp.


Overall despite its youth it is a very capable OS. (IMO)

 

[pascal]

I installed the Windows XP and will install Vista for a dual boot configuration while testing my softwares.

This dual-cpu configuration is really good :smile:

Thanks all for your help.

 

[swaaye]

I believe Vista will be a very nice OS in about a year. It has a lot of quirks right now. But really, I have a very hard time seeing how it could be seen as some sort of incredible improvement that would make you want to stay away from XP. I've heard on here that it's great for IT folks who have to manage a zillion systems, but that's not something I'll ever see.

Right now, aside from the obvious D3D10 advantage, the other big advantage I've noticed is with mult-monitor configs. It works better than XP. I can drag video windows from one monitor to the other and not have bad things happen. XP didn't like doing that.

But I really despise how slow Vista feels for copying files. It is obviously doing more than XP does to just move files around. And I don't see how that's benefiting me or the file copy process, lol. I also see around a 10-20MB/s faster transfer rate across the network in XP. Other comps run XP. Don't know if it would help if they ran Vista, but that's not happening anyway for various reasons.

 

[Frank]

The driver list for Vista 64 is very short. If you only use new stuff from the top ten brands, you're in the clear. Otherwise, it simply won't work.

Mostly because of the crazy demands Microsoft makes for those drivers.

 

[swaaye]

Luckily MS includes their usual large amount of basic drivers for hardware. Heck, my 14 yr old Laserjet 4P works yet. But yea, some somewhat old hardware will never see drivers.