Blog FeedWindows Vista: A Gamer’s Perspective
I recently made the move from Windows XP to Vista. I know, I know what you’re thinking - why? Well, truth be told, I was buying a new PC. It was primarily for gaming, but it just did not make any sense to buy a machine with XP on it, only to face the possibility that at some point in the future I will want a game that is for Vista only. It’s true that DX10 is Vista only, but because of budget considerations and poor midrange DX10 cards options, that didn’t really factor into my decision. All that being said the experience with Vista has had it’s ups and downs much like any OS. Vista was launched a bit before its time with plenty of annoying bugs and compatibility issues that needed to be ironed out. While there have been many updates, the system is still sorely in need of a service pack before this OS will be something I could whole-heartedly recommend. If you’re buying a new machine this still makes sense but if you’ve got a working XP box there is no real reason to rush out to upgrade your machine.
Test Rig
My new PC, just for a frame of reference, was neither completely bare bones nor was it a super powerful machine either. I have an Athlon64 X2 5400+ processor, 2gig of RAM (after the second week originally I only had 1gig) and a Radeon X1950 GT graphics card with ATI’s latest drivers.
Security
One of the much ballyhooed features in Vista has been a renewed effort on security. Microsoft has finally got religion when it comes to designing a system for multiple users and distinguishing between user/administrator in a home OS. Furthermore it has now attempted to solve the biggest security problem in XP - idiots. Ultimately the biggest problem XP had was that the majority of it’s user base is completely moronic when it comes to security issues. They will run things they shouldn’t, click on links they shouldn’t and that kind of thing without knowing it. The solution they applied to this seems incredibly heavy handed - asking if you’re sure you want to do what you told the computer to do about a million times a day. Additionally there is another issue with regards to security - it’s ultimately not a very compelling feature. Speaking not as someone who understands the nature of programming but just as a consumer I expect my software to be secure; it is not a feature to make them secure any more than it’s a feature to make it work properly. I understand it is much more complex than that in reality but it’s very difficult to get all excited over this kind of stuff.
Warm on the outside, gui on the inside
The new GUI in Vista is really nice. Gone are the super-bright colors of XP and they’ve been replaced with a translucent glass that’s a very muted shade of blue. After years of using XP it was nice to have the OS get a face-lift as it was getting very dated. A lot of these innovations in regard to the UI are lifted straight out of OS X’s play book. Windows now has widgets, and when you Alt+Tab through programs or view them on the Start menu they are previewed for you just as I’m used to seeing in OS X. The widgets (they call them gadgets but they work as widgets), are one of the more useful additions to Vista. For anyone not in the know widgets are little single purpose apps that can be really quickly installed and ran. They run the gamut from the terribly useful to the terribly useless. Vista offers a nice selection both out of the box and off a quickly accessible website.
Dapper Apps
Applications ran on Vista like a dream. Everything I use on a daily basis was installed the first night I had my new box home. iTunes, Open Office, Trillian, Xfire, Ruckus player, Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, WinRAR, Virtual Daemon all hit the nail on the head. With regards to hardware my mouse, keyboard, joystick, game pad, thumb drive and iPod all worked well, the one area of some exception was the printer. HP decided not to make Vista drivers for my printer, but they provided a relatively simple work-around so on balance even that was not such a terrible experience. One area that deserves special praise is how much nicer Vista plays with an Xbox 360 than XP did. The tying together of Vista and my 360 was an especially painless experience as it did not require as much tail chasing as my XP Media Center PC had. One area that proved tricky with Vista was that of memory consumption. Vista uses a lot of memory and also likes to store frequently used apps in memory for faster loading times; if you have less than 2 gigabytes of memory this can be a little bit annoying especially if you combine memory hungry Vista with memory hungry Office and memory hungry Firefox 2.
Games for Windows?
One of their big pushes with Vista has been in association with Games for Windows. To those ends they’ve included a games tab on the Start menu that provides a whole litany of information to the user. The game’s rating is prominently displayed with the indicators of why it received that rating. When I click on Company of Heroes it tells me that this is rated M for blood and gore, intense violence and strong language. More usefully it comes with games adviser built into the system which scans your system and assigns it a numerical value and tells you the game’s required and recommended specs. Company of Heroes requires a 1.0 and my current machine is a 4.5 so i can run it. It’s a bit more nebulous with some games, however. Neverwinter Nights 2 for instance recommends a 5 so I don’t measure up there even though i meet the recommended specs Direct2Drive posted, so perhaps there are still some kinks to be worked out with the system. Overall, it does actually sound a bit more promising than it really works out. First of all many games don’t give all this information and some games don’t work with it at all. I had to manually add Baldur’s Gate 2 and all my Steam games to the explorer as it just doesn’t work with many older products. Additionally any game that came out before 2006 will likely not have the system requirements information on them at all. While it’s not necessarily a perfect system, I like the games explorer as it provides a default solution to something I’ve been working with since Windows 95, how best to organize my games while still keeping the desktop clean.
As for the actual playing of games, this has been the most mixed part of the experience. Some games have worked perfectly, but unfortunately not all of them. Knights of the Old Republic 2 was an especially precarious proposition. To enjoy my game I had to spend an especially long time on self-help forums getting advice that often bordered on the kind you might expect when telling someone how to get reception with an old-fashioned bunny ear set of antennas on TV. After replacing several files, I did get the game to run but even then it suffered from consistent crashes. Some of this isn’t really Vista’s fault as the game was buggy before but some of it is, as the game just doesn’t like the new audio driver model Vista uses and requires a specific file to even play the game with sound. Lucas Arts seems oblivious to our plight and the chances of a patch appear to be slim and none - and slim just left town.
The Blue Screen of DEATH
But KOTOR 2 was not even the low point. The low point was not one game not working right, but in the end it was that the OS has brought back something I thought XP had cast on the ash heap of history. In just a few weeks running Vista I’ve seen the return of the Blue Screen of Death. Seriously it’s 2007 folks, why the fuck is my OS still crashing? My Mac never crashes, XP very seldom crashed on me but it’s been almost like 98 all over again since getting Vista. That said, it’s worth noting that I know people who’ve been running Vista longer than I have who have yet to see a Blue Screen - your mileage may vary as always.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately this OS will be fine - it is just a service pack away from being the operating system you really want. If you have to buy an OS today then it’s still really the one to get. As a gamer this is the OS i need to have; as someone who is very familiar with the three largest OSes out there today (Windows, Mac and Linux) it’s just like any of them. It has some stuff I really like, some stuff I could do without, and some stuff I’m somewhat indifferent towards. It’s not my dream OS - a free open source OS that’s incredibly intuitive, with a command line option and support for DirectX and every computer game working on it out of the box. But then again what is? If you’re a Windows user this is really the logical next-step. If you’re a Mac user or Linux aficionado, the only real reason you’d want Vista is if you suddenly felt an urge to play more games.
19th August | Reply
I have had a copy of Vista Business sitting in my cupboard for a couple of months now, waiting for me to upgrade my gaming machine (which I am planning to do around Vista’s SP1 release date, just so it all works out nicely). So I was expecting to have no real Vista experience until then.
That plan was thrown out the window over this past week when I got a new job, and was kitted out with a new laptop. It’s a little 14″ IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad with Vista Business on it, and I have to say that so far I am pretty impressed. At first the thing was ridiculously slow - it only has 1gig of RAM and that’s been evidently shown as insufficient, but a lot of excessive hard drive activity I managed to cut out by disabling the indexing service which was on by default. The laptop has an Nvidia Quadro NVS 140M on it… I had no idea what that was, really, but a quick check online reveals that it’s pixel-pushing performance is about on par with a GeForce 8400M. Reasonable, so I tried some games.
WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne was the first thing to show up in the Games Explorer folder (because Vista Business doesn’t even come with Solitaire), and that was nice. After that I tried Steam while at a friends house to play some original Counter-Strike. It didn’t show up in the games folder until after I had played it - then it showed up no problems, without me having to do anything. I am yet to try this for more Steam titles, but I would expect it to work the same. Generally speaking it all ran fine but they’re hardly demanding games for a Core 2 Duo system.
The memory is going to be a problem with other titles though. BF2 loads slowly enough on my 1gig XP machine. Sitting at idle, Vista chews 550 meg of RAM for me. The Quadro graphics card has 128mb of dedicated memory, and then can use an additional 256 or so of the system RAM if it needs to. While that’s unlikely, I find it odd that they even bothered selling this machine with only 1gig of RAM as it’s clearly not enough if someone were using the Quadro as intended. Which I intend. Sort of.
The best part though is that I’ve not really had any stability issues whatsoever, unlike my sister who has Vista Home Premium on her new HP laptop. She’s had problems galore, even without games.
19th August | Reply
I did try Vista last year with the Beta 2 release and uninstalled it very quickly since its performance was woeful in comparison to XP. Legend has it that Beta 2 was a duff release and that the retail version is much improved but it was enough to convince me that upgrading wasn’t something that was needed. Mostly the reason for this is that Windows is only used to run business applications at work so DirectX 10 isn’t of interest to me or gaming on a PC at all.
In a couple of months we’ll be able to compare Vista’s release to Leopard’s and that’ll be interesting. The Tiger release was, as far as I was concerned, marred by bugs that did cause the OS to crash in the Apple equivalent to the Windows BSOD. It will be interesting to see if the same happens again in Leopard or if Apple has done the testing properly this time.
Question though: what are the high points of Vista for you? Is there anything beyond the Aero interface and Gadgets to recommend it, particularly if you don’t plan to use it for games?
20th August | Reply
There’s a good reason for Neverwinter Nights 2 to be rated a 5.0, it’s definitely not a bug or a mistake, it’s an accurate rating. The recommended system specs listed on Direct2Drive are too low, I know because my current PC (Athlon64 3200+, 2 GB RAM, X800) slightly exceeds those recommended specs, but I can’t play NWN2 in anything but low detail and resolution.
Right now the only way to play Neverwinter Nights 2 in maximum detail in high resolution (1600×1200 and up) is to have a Geforce 8800 GTX and Core 2 Duo E6600 or better.. and even then you’ll still be stuck below 40 fps (ok, maybe slightly above that with the recent performance patches). The only two games which manage to perform worse than NWN 2 are Armed Assault (due to bugs) and Supreme Commander 6+ player multiplayer.
So yes, by all means 5.0 is an accurate score for Neverwinter Nights 2. It’s not a glitch or a miscalculation on Microsoft’s part, but a more accurate representation of the game’s performance than the recommended system specifications listed on the game’s box (and direct2drive).
That being said: it’s still a great game and even in low/mid detail it looks pretty impressive, particularly in combat. I can’t wait to play through it again, in full detail, once my new hardware arrives! Without Vista, because I see no reason to ‘upgrade’. It’s slower, directx 10 isn’t needed nor optimized for yet & just a new shiny interface doesn’t seem quite worth it… maybe when SP1 arrives…
21st August | Reply
@ Kelmon
Honestly there isn’t anything that’s like a big gigantic standout feature other than the new GUI. One thing that really did get a nice makeover is the search functionality—like it actually works right now as i’ve had some issues in Xp but that could just be serendipitious as I haven’t had enough time for my hard drive to get super cluttered and be looking for something super arcane that i only know part of the name of where search would really prove itself.
@ Droniac
NWN2 is a strange game, i can’t figure out what the issue with that games was. I got it to play and finished the game on the lowest possible settings on a 2500+ xp and 6800 but then it runs really nicely on my machine but for all its taxation on the hardware it doesn’t really look particuarily nice or appear to be doing any especially complex AI or physics routine so I don’t really know what to make of that game.
In general I agree upgrading isn’t the way to go. It’s a good way to go if you’re buying a new machine with a new OS and the whole 9 yards. And it is really a service pack away so no rush at all.
21st August | Reply
One thing I have been enjoying so far is the built in Performance and Reliability Monitor. I’ve been able to see exactly what my hard drive is doing - it lists all the active processes on the machine, and which ones are reading/writing a lot to the hard drive (and which folder).
Telling me that Windows itself is constantly writing to the page file doesn’t help though. I already knew that was going to happen when I saw my laptop was stuck with just 1gig of RAM.
I also liked that when I plugged in my Blackjack phone, Vista realised it didn’t have the necessary software and just downloaded it for me using Windows Update. I don’t just mean a driver, I mean the actual mobile syncing application for all mobile devices. Handy.
That said, I now have a wireless internet USB card here which I need to try as I may need it for work. It’s fine with XP but Vista seems to have issues, which I still need to sort out.
21st August | Reply
Windows Desktop Search seems to work pretty well for me under Parallels Desktop. I did have issues with Spotlight under OS X where I found that it pretty slow even on the new MacBook Pro. However, when I recently reinstalled the OS Spotlight’s performance dramatically increased. It’s possible that you are seeing a similar effect with Vista where the installation of the OS resulted in the improvement in performance rather than anything inherently different between XP and Vista.
Mind you, Windows Desktop Search definitely feels like an add-on on XP so having it integrated better into the OS itself would be useful. Do you get access to it via Open/Save File dialogs like you do with OS X and Spotlight?
25th August | Reply
I’ve been using Vista for a little over a month now and I must say: I love it. Although it does have a few annoyances at first (like the many security warnings), they’re either easy to get used to or went away as soon as I was done installing all my drivers and software.
BSoDs? Haven’t seen ‘em yet. The only crash I’ve had so far was due to an overheated system, but a simple rearrangement of my casefans (which were admittedly arranged quite poorly at first - I was too anxious to see my brand new system up and running to spend much time arranging them properly) solved those problems. Besides that I’ve felt that so far, when I had a crashing game or other piece of software, Vista handled it better than I was used to in XP, providing more information and presenting that information in a friendlier manner.
Drivers? No troubles there. All my hardware has specialised Vista drivers. Even the PCI ATA controller I use for four of my five HDDs and which before Vista hadn’t had a driver update since 2001 had some fancy new Vista drivers.
The new Start menu works great, that breadcrumb type of navigation is fantastic and even the Task Manager has a nice updated look. Overall I really feel that although Vista’s security measures can be limiting at times, the fact that it generally provides more information when you’re handling problems (outside of Vista’s fault) really make up for it.
Plus, it’s just so pretty. Vista is the first OS where I specifically decided I wanted to keep all the useless graphical additions ON. I’ve always felt that XP was butt-ugly, so it really is nice to finally have a truly pretty OS. And best of all: I haven’t had a single moment where I felt it might be slowing my system down, because overall, my system really feels lightning-fast (of course the 4.8 rating does help in that respect
).
And as for gaming? I’m in love with the Games Explorer. In previous Windows-versions I’ve never felt it neccessary to put all my games in once place. As long as they were somewhere in the start menu they were accessible enough. But for some reason, the Games Explorer just works.
Of course, a nice and pretty interface doesn’t help anything when the performance in games lags behind XP. Of the games I’ve tried so far (Far Cry, Hitman: Blood Money and the Bioshock demo), I haven’t had performance troubles with any of them. Especially Far Cry ran like a dream (which was to be expected, considering its age), but even the Bioshock demo I was able to run with full DirectX 10 details on my 8600GT. Which brings me to my final point: DirectX 10 is SWEET!
25th August | Reply
Ahhh what’s the rush people? As everyone pointed out despite looking very cool, as an operating system it has plenty of bugs. So why change a good thing for no reason? The XP hasn’t outlived its time yet and there aren’t enough Vista exclusives out there to make me want to upgrade yet. So until a service pack is released XP is my best friend.
26th August | Reply
Well as Vermy said, he didn’t change OSes so much as he changed PCs.
As for XP outliving it’s time, I am not so sure. Thanks to delays, the gap between XP’s release and Vista’s was longer than any other major Microsoft OS release since I started using a computer. It only takes one look at OSX’s more regular updates/releases to see just how far behind XP is.
I find it strange that before Vista was released, people were saying how overdue MS was for an up-to-date OS. Now it’s here many of those same people are now saying that XP is fine for now and to wait. That said, I am indeed one of those people.
26th August | Reply
I had the same situation. I was upgrading my PC and needed to reinstall my OS anyway, so I decided to sieze te opportunity and go with Vista.
I’m generally very reluctant to reinstall my computer (I pride myself on the fact that my previous XP installation lasted for just under two years, without any loss in speed or stability during that time and would’ve lasted longer if I hadn’t decided to upgrade my PC), so this really was the perfect opportunity. And so far, I haven’t been disappointed.
28th August | Reply
In Reply to #9:
I suspect that people wouldn’t have a problem with Vista if it wasn’t that it appears to have been a botched job. The only aspect of the OS that interests me is the improved security over XP (I know, that’s really boring) but if the User Account Control is so intrusive that you end up turning it off then it kinda defeats the objective. For those people that really need a Windows PC I’m recommending them to stick with XP for the time-being, particularly if they are buying a budget PC since Vista seems to require much higher resources to run adequately.
Of course, as with any OS it typically matures over its life so the recommendation to stick with XP is something that needs to be reviewed periodically, particularly when the Service Packs are released. However, I still find it quite telling that my company’s IT organisation still bans Vista. Thankfully they have at least approved Office 2007 and IE7.
9th September | Reply
I cant even get steam to update all its stuff. I had a laptop and it was horrible for playing css but it got me by. So i got a computer over the summer and it had vista…. and i cant even get steam to update to play online or even offline it justs stops at 26% and steam turns completly off