Vista observations and opinions

Hah, I had an Epson Perfection 1200 too. Any rate, as part of my Vista upgrade I bought a Canon MP830 all-in-one. But I made a point of investigating the matter beforehand (ahem!).

The one that surprised me was Acrobat Professional. No x64 version for that until 8.10 (i.e. if you have v7 or earlier, too bad). Creative didn't really surprise me, alas. And I have onboard sound to compensate with for as long as it takes (or forever, as the case may be...if they want to hurry their slide into irrelevance, that's their problem).
 
I'm running with 2GB of memory. Still haven't installed a single game to see how sound works. Also found out after posting that my HP 1020 has no Vista drivers and no support for x64 versions of XP or 2003 either.

That new WD Raptor I ordered came in the mail yesterday, so I'm basically just flipping the boot order in the BIOS for which OS I want to use. Wife says the lack of a printer is a show-stopper for her.
HP printers are normally pretty easy: just take any other one with about the same specs. It'll work fine.
 
My Vista experience so far has been miserable. I have seen more bluescreens in 5 days running Vista than in 5 years running WinXP. I set up Vista 64bit on my PC and Vista 32bit on my father's new office PC (32bit because there are no 64bit drivers for the scanner and the WiFi NIC, woot).

Now, not all of this crap is neccessarily Vista's fault but the fact is, I had none of these problem running WindowsXP. So here we go:


- UAC is infuriatingly annoying and it's such a fucking lame attempt to shift responsibility for Vista's lack of a coherent security architecture to the user.

- Windows Defender bogs down the system so severly that it's simply not an option to use it. What an utter piece of shit. Switching it off improves Vista and application start up times significantly and it also gets rid of really odd errors that have been driving me insane, like nHancer giving an error message because the application starts up faster than the associated service.

- There is no Vista 64 compatible version of Avira's AntiVir, so I have to use AVAST!, which sucks.

- absolutely no way to run DOS programs (don't ask) in fullscreen mode (or at all using Vista 64).

- The Sidebar is worthless. 99% of the gadgets suck, there aren't a lot of them to begin with and most of them do the same stuff. How many fugly SEARCH EBAY! gadgets does a man need? Plus, it takes forever to start up.

- IE7 doesn't run stable under Vista. It crashes frequently. I'm not the only person with that problem, in fact, it's so widespread that it's used by the makers of the IE7Pro add-on to advertise their crash recovery feature. Pathetic.

- The driver signature thing sucks and, if you installed the the recently released update that supposedly gets rid of all the GPU problems and nvlddmkm.sys crashes (hint: it doesn't) that make Vista 64 useless as a gaming platform, you can't even switch it off anymore. YAY, no more ATITool and Rivatuner for j00!

- Vista doesn't wake up from hibernate mode on either PC (never had any problems with this under XP)

- I use XMPlay for my MP3s and 2 out of 3 times when I double-click on a mp3 I get a "file not found" error... I have to do it several times until the file is recognized. This is especially annoying when downloading a mp3 and trying to run it from the browsers "download complete" dialogue box.

- Slow speed when copying files, less than 50% of WinXP. I wonder how that severe bug made it into the RMT version. Copying files takes fucking forever. There is a new patch that reduces the problem to a certain extend.

- I found it virtually impossible to copy files over the wireless network at an acceptable speed, no such problem on my XP laptop that sits right next to my desktop and actually has worse signal quality.

- The weird file system. So now you can add a fuckton of meta data to files, which no one will ever do, so there's essentially a ton of empty columns in Windows Explorer. You can do shit like giving files a 5-star rating, for whatever reason. I had to spend hours configuring Windows Explorer to make it reasonable to look at. And you have to do it for every "type" of directory over again.

- Most applications under Vista, for some reason, don't memorize the last location where you saved a file, so almost every file dialogue starts off in the default user/documents directory which frequently drives me into apoplectic rage.

- Horrendous Nvidia driver issues (the constant nvlddmkm.sys crashes with G80 cards) and it's not yet clear whether it's a Nvidia or Vista problem. On the one hand, Nvidia has been releasing drivers that supposedly fix this problem for months now (it never actually worked), on the other hand we now have a MS patch that supposedly fixes the problem (see above, doesn't work either). Other NVidia driver problems include issues with TV output, flat panel scaling (can't change it) and video quality issues

- The aforementioned video quality issues took days for me to work out. Apparently, the NVidia's Vista drivers have a scaling problem when VRM 7/9 is used as output renderer. Essentially, what you get is horrid aliasing and this problem has been around forever.

Unless you're using Microsoft's bloated Windows Media Player (which uses EVR as default renderer), you have to use a media player that allows you to manually switch the output renderer to EVR or Haali's. It took me days to figure that one out. This doesn't work for all media types, btw. RealMedia files and older Quicktime stuff is virtually unwatchable under Vista.

- There is no Nvidia driver tray icon under Vista.

- Vista makes extensive use of the virtual directory feature for language localization purposes... so things can get very confusing if you try to figure out where stuff actually ends up. I tried to reorganize my start menu by directly working on the start menu directory (of which there are apparently two, one for entries for all users and a uset specific one) and I somehow ended up with a half English, half German mongrel of a start menu. Why can't it be as straight forward as it was in WinXP?


I haven't done much gaming since I installed Vista, partly because of the frequent nvlddmkm.sys crashes.

- EVE Online reboots the PC with a blue screen if you use on-board sound. Worked fine with XP. It's not enough to disable on-board sound in Vista, you actually have to disable it in the BIOS. Sure, it's prolly as much EVE Online's fault as Vista's but the fact remains that I didn't have this problem under XP.

- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. First of all, it's a nightmare to get it even to run under Vista in the first place and then there is a reproducable nvlddmkm.sys crash on Korriban, which is fucking odd because everything before and after that works.

- Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II always starts in windowed mode and has severe sound problems. Sometimes, dialogues with with no voice-overs skip so quickly that you can't read them (like in "fraction of a second" quick).

- Civilization IV crashes frequently in the late game, rarely did so under WinXP

- Do I even have to mention the noticably lower graphics performance of games under Vista?


Vista... man, it sucks. I want to listen to music with my favourite player application... *DING* FILE NOT FOUND. Hey, let's watch a video... nice aliasing right there. How about a game... great, yet another nvlddmkm.sys error. And hi2u, Mr. IE7 Crash.

I guess I can consider myself lucky that I don't run SLI or surround sound, neither of which would work properly.

But hey, at least it does look pretty and the Windows Explorer has a semi-useful search box, right? Installing Vista 64 has been a waste of time and money. If you're a gamer with a G80 card, you should avoid Windows Vista like rape.
 
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- absolutely no way to run DOS programs (don't ask) in fullscreen mode (or at all using Vista 64).

Well, I haven't experienced most of the rest of your problems (granted, I'm using vista 32 and an ati card, both of which are reputed to be generally more stable than vista 64 and nvidia), but for this one why don't you try using dosbox? It works great for legacy dos apps.

One major showstopped issue I had with vista was after upgrading my ide drivers. Vista would fail to boot, safe mode failed, all the various recovery options failed. Also, after trying one of the restore points (which failed) I tried choosing another one, and it wouldn't let me because it insisted another restore was still in progress. Doh.

I eventually fixed this by going into the command prompt using the vista cd (which is painful to use, I use linux most of the time when I need to fix vista but I happened to already be on the vista recovery console) and just deleted the offending drivers. Started up with no problems after that. Ridiculous, considering that safe mode is supposed to use only dumbed down safe drivers, right? For a recovery mode that's made specifically to fix stuff like installing drivers that don't work, nothing microsoft included in vista was able to do jack, especially when the actual solution was so simple.
 
Well, I haven't experienced most of the rest of your problems (granted, I'm using vista 32 and an ati card, both of which are reputed to be generally more stable than vista 64 and nvidia), but for this one why don't you try using dosbox? It works great for legacy dos apps.
DOS programs work fine under Vista 32, which, AFAIK, uses the same emulation WinXP does. The problem is that you can't run DOS programs in full screen. It's not a deal breaker but it is annoying.

DOSBox... does it support printing yet?
 
DOS programs work fine under Vista 32, which, AFAIK, uses the same emulation WinXP does. The problem is that you can't run DOS programs in full screen. It's not a deal breaker but it is annoying.

DOSBox... does it support printing yet?

Printing, eh? I think it may be time for you to update your version of wordperfect then. (or perhaps be content with a print screen/text dump)

This version of dosbox mentions something about printing support, but it may just mean printing to the screen
http://home.arcor.de/h-a-l-9000/dbdl.html

For full on printing support, I'd suggest dual booting a version of ms dos or freedos OR maybe bochs (x86 emulator, likely to be too slow for just about anything though) or how about...
virtualization! There exists free virtualization software, and it shouldn't be so difficult to get some version of DOS working.

There are patches that appear to give real printer support to dosbox, but they probably are a little sketchy. Besides that, apparently dosbox supports emulating a printer and printing out to postscript / bitmap /png files, which can then be opened in windows and printed.
 
If you're a gamer with a G80 card, you should avoid Windows Vista like rape.

Wow, L233. :oops: It's like we're on different planets with this. I did have a few issues with Vista 32-bit (turned out to be old nForce 4 drivers not being updated), but 64-bit has been very stable for me with G80 the last month or so. Tho I'll admit I haven't gamed with it yet.

A few more details on the hardware you're running on? You mentioned nHancer which makes me twitch a bit. I know nTune has been no joy at all.
 
L233, where stability is concerned, perhaps you're running into this issue?

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3060

Nope. This is what I'm talking about.

What happens is that nvlddmkm.sys stops responding, which crashes the application and you get a pop-up telling you that nvlddmkm.sys has been recovered.

As I said, it's not clear if it's a Vista or display driver problem, as both, MS and Nvidia, have offered supposed fixes, none of which work for me. You can get these crashes 10 seconds after starting up games that barely even use up 500 mb - so no, it has nothing to do with the 2GB barrier.

The only thing that seems to have an impact is using a very specific driver version (158.45), which makes these crashes much less frequent but the problem has been back with a vengeance in the new 16x.xx drivers.
 
Wow, L233. :oops: It's like we're on different planets with this. I did have a few issues with Vista 32-bit (turned out to be old nForce 4 drivers not being updated), but 64-bit has been very stable for me with G80 the last month or so. Tho I'll admit I haven't gamed with it yet.
Eh, the nvlddmkm.sys crashes occur mainly when gaming, with some DX10 graphics demos and, so I heard, when using the Dreamscape feature of Vista Ultimate. Other than that, I didn't have any G80 issues but, eh, you don't need a G80 to run Aero.

A few more details on the hardware you're running on? You mentioned nHancer which makes me twitch a bit. I know nTune has been no joy at all.
nTune has always sucked, nHancer (not related to nTune in any way) is a great little tool, which I can't do without, since nVidia has been too inept to even fix the tiny little bug that has been preventing the driver's tray icon from being loaded since, AFAIK, Vista Beta. nHancer isn't an overclocking tool, it's a little app for AA and AF settings and SLI profiles.

The problem with nHancer was a minor one. nHancer needs a service to be loaded at start up but with Windows Defender enabled, starting the service took so long that the the application finished loading before the associated service ran, causing it to quit with an error. And this even happened on my PC using the newest version of nHancer, which even added a 10 second delay to accomodate for Vista's sluggish start up.

Switching off Windows Defender not only solved that problem but also improved general performance. And Windows Defender is the most ineffective anti-malware application out there anyway.

It's no biggie but it was very frustrating trying to figure out what the fuck was happening. And that neatly describes my Vista experience... wasting time trying to figure out why things don't work like they're supposed to. The most aggravating of the bunch, aside from the nvlddmkm.sys issue, was figuring out why my videos look like crap when using anything other than the insufferable Windows Media Player.

My System, btw.:

Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3.6 GHz
Gigabyte GA-P35-DQ6 (best damn mainboard I've ever seen)
4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 RAM CL4
Asus 8800 GTS 640MB
Soundblaster X-Fi Music
2x WD 250GB HDs, 1x Samsung 160GB HD
Samsung SH-S203B DVD writer
Corsair HX520 PSU

It's not a problem caused by overclocking (happens all the same at stock speeds), nor is it a temperature problem. The RAM passes hours of Prim95 and MemTest (and it's not overclocked to begin with). There are plenty reports of people experiencing this problem, so it's unlikely that it has anything to do with my specific configuration.
 
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This is true. Did you find it in the right-click-on-desktop menu tho?

Sure, the control panel isn't missing, the tray icon is. I kind of like the tray icon because I like to change my AA or AF settings with less than 5-6 clicks.
 
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What happens is that nvlddmkm.sys stops responding, which crashes the application and you get a pop-up telling you that nvlddmkm.sys has been recovered.

The only thing that seems to have an impact is using a very specific driver version (158.45), which makes these crashes much less frequent but the problem has been back with a vengeance in the new 16x.xx drivers.

It does seem to be highly tied to which driver you're running. I've hit this issue when running the 163.11 drivers. I had it occur when running MCE on the second LCD and in FF on the main LCD. It's a royal PITA. IT kept on occuring every 6-10 seconds too.

The error can also be related to failing memory dimms. This alerted me to an issue with one of my dimms before any other programs acted flaky. It seems to be a sort of catch-all for any sort of major system issues. :cry:
 
Oh, the unbearable lightness of the dreaded crcdisk.sys hang. Was going through all my test apps last night, installing, patching, configuring, when Vista stopped responding. Rebooted, wouldn't come up. Went into safe mode, hangs on crcdisk.sys. It was late so I turned the machine off in disgust. Been swamped at work this morning, but my quick browsing for information suggests it's a problem with the mainboard's (975xbx2) SATA controller. I'm going to try disconnecting anything else using SATA ports and putting the boot drive on SATA1 to see if this helps. I downloaded the latest Intel drivers for that board, so I don't think it's a driver issue.

Anyone else have this problem?
 
Oh, the unbearable lightness of the dreaded crcdisk.sys hang. Was going through all my test apps last night, installing, patching, configuring, when Vista stopped responding. Rebooted, wouldn't come up. Went into safe mode, hangs on crcdisk.sys. It was late so I turned the machine off in disgust. Been swamped at work this morning, but my quick browsing for information suggests it's a problem with the mainboard's (975xbx2) SATA controller. I'm going to try disconnecting anything else using SATA ports and putting the boot drive on SATA1 to see if this helps. I downloaded the latest Intel drivers for that board, so I don't think it's a driver issue.

Anyone else have this problem?

I had that exact problem after updating my SATA drivers!
Fixed it by going into recovery console and deleting the offending driver files in the system32 folder. Then rebooted windows and windows found and installed usable drivers on its own. Alternatively, you could try playing new drivers in the system32 folder, but that didn't work for me.

Booting off a linux live cd and mounting the windows partition would also allow you to accomplish the same thing, assuming windows doesn't notice a non-microsoft product wrote to its drive.
 
Well, I haven't touched the SATA drivers and this install has been working fine, through repeated reboots, for several days before I hit this issue last night. I'm going to update the board's BIOS and try putting just that one drive on the first SATA port (confirming that the 2nd SATA controller is disabled) before screaming like a little girl and fighting with finding the SATA driver via the recovery console.
 
Booting off a linux live cd and mounting the windows partition would also allow you to accomplish the same thing, assuming windows doesn't notice a non-microsoft product wrote to its drive.
I think Linux NTFS write support is still very limited, so I doubt this would work.
 
I think Linux NTFS write support is still very limited, so I doubt this would work.

I know I had to download some beta software to get writing permissions to NTFS, but I'd imagine it's ok for something as simple as deleting a file. Wouldn't try to cohabitate my linux install and vista install on the same partition though.
 
I know I had to download some beta software to get writing permissions to NTFS, but I'd imagine it's ok for something as simple as deleting a file. Wouldn't try to cohabitate my linux install and vista install on the same partition though.
I'm not so sure. From what I've read, Linux write support on NTFS is limited to being able to modify files without changing the file size. This makes it decent for using a file in an NTFS partition for a swap partition (Knoppix can do this), but not much else. From what the Linux guys say in the kernel documentation, NTFS is built like a database, with information about a file stored in many different places. Thus, simply deleting a file might result in some references to the file not being updated if not done correctly, which might, in turn, corrupt the disk.
 
NTFS writing from Linux is actually pretty decent nowadays if you use a distro with the recent driver, like Ubuntu, but you cannot change the metadata. Not a problem in 99+% of the cases, but it could potentially bork up things when you replace a file that has it.
 
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