Vista observations and opinions

Having turned off about 25 services, Windows Defender, System Restore, and auto tuning on the network stack, my Vista install is now tolerable.
 
What does the network autotuning do? Speed detection? Microsoft Network crawler type thingy?
 
What does the network autotuning do? Speed detection? Microsoft Network crawler type thingy?

It tries to dynamically detect the best TCP window size for the type of data you are receiving.
 
I think Vista is decent. I am rather neutral on all of the changes other than perhaps the Start Menu. But, honestly, even back to Win98 the Start Menu was fine to me and file indexing has never been all that useful to me. I'm more of a console guy anyway, having grown up with DOS and spent lots of time with Linux.

Vista really bogs down my old laptop's Radeon 9600. It's much slower in games than under XP. On a card with framerate "to burn" (for now), it's not as noticeably slower. But whatcha gonna do if you want to run the upcoming Direct3D 10 stuff. Hopefully not all of these games will be slideshows, unlike the current releases.

I would be perfectly happy with XP w/ D3D10, but of course, MS obviously didn't want that to happen. What we really needed was to have OpenGL win the API battle. That's the OpenGL consortium (or whoever they are)'s fault and game devs faults. MS sucked them in and now we are suffering from the API monopoly. OpenGL had its chance, with the half decade that D3D was trash, but it just didn't work out.
 
My x-fi is still fucked with 4GB installed.

Upate on this x64 "4GB and Xfi" issue: After seeing a mention elsewhere that MS had patched Vista to cure this problem (something to do with fighting with Creative's drivers over a particular set of memory locations is what the post said), I re-enabled my XFi to give a listen. Didn't even reinstall the drivers (Creative's 5/30 set), just reenabled the hardware in Device Manager and switched the speaker jack from the onbard to the Xfi.

Sho 'nuf, it's working now. . . It's not always indicative (as any graphics driver guy will tell you, sometimes quite loudly) of where the problem is just because who made the fix. . . but I tend to think it really was on MS side or they'd have made Creative fix it instead.
 
Having turned off about 25 services, Windows Defender, System Restore, and auto tuning on the network stack, my Vista install is now tolerable.
Whch services exactly did you turn off? I've heard lots about people turing off all kinds of services ever since XP was new but I never bothered much with it really.

With vista though the number of background processes seems to have exploded.,.



Also..

I am crazy enough to subscribe to 2 accounts to WoW so that I can boost my own low-level characters and do quests using my high-level chars.

I've noticed that my previous PC, a mere P4 3GHz with an on-board PCI broadcom 100mbit chip running XP gets significantly better ping times than my new monster system with a pci express gigabit broadcom controller.

The difference is in the range of 25 tto as high as 75ms, meaning the new sysystem's pings may be DOUBLE what I see on the old box! Of course this leads to a very noticeable difference in playing experience, especially in a battle.

It's not the router's fault I'm sure because I get consistently higher pings on the neew system even if it is the only one actually turned on and logged into the game.

Also there were no other bandwidth consuming apps running on the new box while I was taking my measurements while I had Skype running on the old box and me talking to a friend and it still produced MUCH better ping times!

Surely Vista's networking support xcan't be this horrible?

Peace.
 
Rainbow, might be just your chip, I'm not sure if my DFI nF4 Ultra-D's integrated Marvel Yukon based NIC is behind PCIe or PCI bus, but it seems to give me better results in WoW than the integrated "nForce4 NIC" (whatever it is, the main NIC coming with the chipset anyway)
 
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