I'm getting a new Dell soon. Should I wait for Vista?

[stwils]

Does anyone know if Vista will be compatible with all of our Civ games? (1,2,3 and 4) What do you hear about the Beta Vista and games? And about Vista's stability?

When do you think it will be available?

I now have a Dell Dimensions Windows 98. It's got a good video card and it's fine for Civ3, but of course you need XP for Civ4. Would you wait a few more months and hope Vista will be available, or would you just go on and get a Dell XPS 410 with Windows XP?

stwils

 

[taper]

Personally, I would buy it now, so that it doesn't have Vista on it. Unless you want the very latest and greatest, XP will do everything you need on cheaper hardware than Vista. Plus, we know XP is stable, secure if properly patched and maintained, but it took several years to get that way. Vista will probably do the same thing. Let someone else struggle with early versions, and wait for the first service pack. There's a good chance new PCs with XP will come with a coupon for a Vista upgrade anyway, so you have nothing to lose.

 

[GenMarshall]

Personaly I would wait untill they work out the bugs out of Vista. I am on a limited income anyway and going to wait anyway.

Since you still have Win98, I would recomend that you get XP. Since most games now run on XP.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

consider This before you do wait out for vista

 

[GenMarshall]

consider This before you do wait out for vista

How can anyone not like Vistaたん?

 

[MarineCorps]

consider This before you do wait out for vista

2GB just to run. Damn.

 

[AL_DA_GREAT]

Vista is the breakthru of linux. It has been delayed almost a year which means it is bugged beyond belief. Many of its features I don't think are at all good.

 

[Underseer]

I will be avoiding Vista until I get a much more powerful computer.

Vista uses DirectX 10, which will not be directly compatible with earlier versions of DirectX, but will instead come with an emulator to handle games written for DirectX 9 or earlier. You will take a performance hit when you try to run DirectX 9 or earlier games under Windows Vista.

The performance hit will vary from game to game. For instance, games that use DirectSound to handle positional (3D) audio will have an extra abstraction layer between themselves and the sound hardware, while games written to use OpenAL for positional audio shouldn't be affected much.

Eventually, there will be hardware available that can handle this performance hit and the extra overhead of running Vista that will be available at a reasonable price. Until then, I will still be using Windows XP.

Of course, if you plan on abandoning all your current and older games and switching to only DirectX 10 games, then you should like Windows Vista as a gaming platform quite a bit.

 

[stwils]

Thanks, guys, for the helpful input.

I don't think I will wait for Vista. (Sounds like I'd be waiting for trouble.)

I know the Dell 410 will be upgradeable to Vista, but I would not put myself into such a nightmare of changing OS, downloading drivers, and adding new software.

I'm not really computer savvy. All I want is a STABLE fast computer with a great video card, plenty of ram, and one that will work right out of the box!

I think I will leave Vista alone.

Getting a new Dell 410 with XP will be good enough; then I can still play all my games plus so many more (Civ4.)

Thanks for your help.

stwils

 

[Underseer]

How can anyone not like Vistaたん?

Actually, fans of Civ4 have a compelling reason to wait. Even under Windows XP, Civ4 is a resource hog. If you're having performance problems with the game, those problems will only get worse if you try to run it on Windows Vista.

 

[stwils]

Are you saying that Civ4 will not run as well on Vista as on XP?

stwils

 

[Genocidicbunny]

If the hardware is the same for both systems then yes

 

[Maniacal]

I am gonig to avoid VISTA liek the plague.

Actualy I am getting sick of hearing the propaganda abotu Vista (well, not hearing, more seeing).

All I have to say is, if I could play all my games on Linux I would. Screw you microsoft. Technology should be made for betterment, not just personal gain.

 

[Underseer]

Are you saying that Civ4 will not run as well on Vista as on XP?

stwils

Yes.

DirectX 10 (comes with Windows Vista) is not backwards compatible with earlier versions of DirectX, so calls to older DirectX functions will be handled through an emulator.

On top of that, Windows Vista itself consumes a lot more resources (RAM, CPU cycles, etc.).

Of course, if you have a very powerful computer, you might not notice the performance degradation, but it certainly will be there.

 

[MarineCorps]

I was in class with someone yesterday who had tested a copy of vista x32 and x64 RC over the weekend. He was saying that the x64 version on idle doing nothing comsumed 700MB of RAM. And the x32 comsumed about 500VB of RAM. You'll need a lot of ram for the OS to run. I think I'll skip this one. XP is just a good and consumes less.

 

[Tank_Guy#3]

From reading the requirements, and from friends that have tried the trial versions, my recommendation would be (quoting them) "Screw Vista!!!!! An OS should be more like a daemon, running in the background. Not a program."

 

[Chieftess]

Even though we'll be switching to Vista at work in a year or two, personally, I'm not gonna buy it. Why? It's pratically 100% eye-candy.

 

[sliph]

Yes.

DirectX 10 (comes with Windows Vista) is not backwards compatible with earlier versions of DirectX, so calls to older DirectX functions will be handled through an emulator.

On top of that, Windows Vista itself consumes a lot more resources (RAM, CPU cycles, etc.).

Of course, if you have a very powerful computer, you might not notice the performance degradation, but it certainly will be there.

I find a lot of these Vista comments incredible. Has anyone here tried a recent version of Vista? First of all, my machine specs:

AMD Athlon 2700+
1GB PC2700 RAM
Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB
20GB partition on a 180GB Seagate SATA hard drive

I build this machine around 3 years ago, and Vista RC2 runs absolutely fine. Moreover, Civilization 4 performance is equivalent to XP as far as I can tell. A game with 10 civilizations on the 2nd largest map size starts out fine, and becomes slow in the modern era on _both_ operating systems. And it's not like my parts are bleeding-edge; I can't even find my 9800 Pro on graphics card comparisons anymore. Even Quake 4 ran with decent performance. If you're that worried about memory usage, disable services like Windows Search, Windows Defender, DWM, none of which exist on XP.

Regarding "Five reasons to hate Windows Vista", I find a lot of those points nonsense. As I've said earlier, 2GB is not required; I'm running with 1GB fine. I don't understand why he's bashing photo sharing. If he doesn't use it, fine, but don't bash a feature others may want. I share photos with family members all the time. And software compatibility is quite good. Worried about possible game compatibility issues, I tried 20+ games on Vista, and the only one with problems is Alice. Civ1, Civ2:MGE, Civ2:ToT, Civ4, Civ4:Warlords all work fine (I don't have Civ3). His last two points basically boil down to "Upgrading has problems although I can't name any specifics with Vista, and Vista doesn't have anything I like."

Take a look at the features new to Vista. If there's nothing compelling there, then by all means stay with whatever OS you have. But there are enough features I like that I'll be upgrading.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Interesting...I have a friend who has a bleeding edge system. he has RC2 on it. He gets about 1/3rd the fps he does in XP, and thats on ALL games. The boot takes a tad bit longer ( about 5 minutes more, aka 6 minutes). Half of his apps dont work on vista and the security for it is oh so annoying. You make a good point that Vista may offer things that you can like, but imho, it offers more things to dislike

Bleeding edge is
Core 2 Duo 2.16 gHz
4 gb RAM
nVidia GeForce 7900GTX in SLi
WD Raptor 10k 150GB

 

[sliph]

Interesting...I have a friend who has a bleeding edge system. he has RC2 on it. He gets about 1/3rd the fps he does in XP, and thats on ALL games. The boot takes a tad bit longer ( about 5 minutes more, aka 6 minutes). Half of his apps dont work on vista and the security for it is oh so annoying. You make a good point that Vista may offer things that you can like, but imho, it offers more things to dislike

A lot of the performance issues may be due to immature graphics drivers. Vista introduced a new graphics driver model, so I expect performance to increase as drivers improve. Which of his applications do not work? My computer usage revolves around games and software development, and both have surprisingly little issues.

Vista's UAC is interesting. In case others don't know, it's a security feature that displays dialog boxes requesting permission before performing privileged operations (essentially any operation that requires administrator privileges). These dialogs come up even if you are an Administrator. UAC can easily be disabled (search for "Configuring UAC settings").

A lot of people find UAC annoying; those dialogs simply don't exist if you run XP as Administrator. However, I ran XP as a regular user (better from a security standpoint), and to me UAC is wonderful. Whereas on XP I'd have to do "runas" or even logoff/logon to perform a privileged operation, on Vista I can simply type in an administrator's username and password and continue.

So UAC is annoying for the vast majority of XP administrator users, but I feel it is better in the long run from a security standpoint.