XP vs Vista

[Ataegina]

vista is far superior than xp, but in my opinion the major problem of having vista its lacks of drivers avaliable for some old hardware (in my case my modem) =/

but vista its a ram hog and still crashing alot =/

[Thanatos]

Dunno about you guys, but for me, Vista is slooooooooooooooooooooow.

And I mean sloooooooooooooooooooooow.

[mrmouth]

Its all relative. I run home premium on a laptop with a core2duo @ 1.50ghz and 1gb of ram.

Its slow to boot, and can get sluggish at times, but its not really what I would consider frustrating. Function-wise I haven't disabled anything, but I have disabled a few services that I don't need, and changed a few to manual so I can start them when I need them, like print spooler. I don't print much.

[sapi]

My only issue is the amount of ram it eats up. On my budget, and the fact I still have old ddr ram, I cant see gaming on Vista until I build a new PC that utilizes ddr2/3. No point in adding another gig at this point, and I really wouldn't be comfortable under 4gb.

You do know to take into account that superfetched ram is shown as used in vista, but prefetched content was not under xp?

That's one change which has had a lot of people overestimating the actual ram use of the new OS, when really it's just been a change in reporting technique

[mrmouth]

While superfetch does show a performance improvement with 1gb of ram, the more you add the better. According to Toms hardware and others, 2gb is where they saw the best performance. Contrastly, 512mb just doesn't cut it as windows plus already eats up almost all of that.

For me 4gb is what I would feel comfortable with as a gamer. That is if I ever DX10 game, it will be on a new build, with 4gb of ddr2/3.

[King Edward III]

For me 4gb is what I would feel comfortable with as a gamer. That is if I ever DX10 game, it will be on a new build, with 4gb of ddr2/3.

Same here. Too bad I'd have to buy the 64bit version of Vista if I want to go above 3 though.

[sapi]

@Sim, technically you're obviously correct, with some interesting data to back it up. However, the fact of that matter does not tally with the point that I was actually attempting to make, which was that driver problems that cause a BSOD under XP will often be cleanly restarted under Vista, presumably as a result of the new and different way drivers are treated in that OS. As you may have noticed, I don't know exactly why this is

Same here. Too bad I'd have to buy the 64bit version of Vista if I want to go above 3 though.

It costs the same, and is functionally pretty much identical (except that it allows you do make full use of a 64-bit CPU, and can have some problems with very old hardware)

[mrmouth]

I have the 32bit. When I build a new PC Im going to just grab an oem copy of the home 64bit version. It will be a strictly gaming PC, so I will end up disabling any of the bells and whistles anyhow.

[Simetrical]

Technically that may be the case, but the biggest problem driver I've seen on any OS installation is the display drive, and nvidia display drivers at least (don't have an ATI card so can't know for sure about them) can and do run in user mode, and are often restarted after failing.

Not true. The actual driver runs entirely in kernel mode. Video drivers simply cannot run effectively without direct memory access, and that isn't easily available in user mode on x86 (32- or 64-bit).

Some microkernels might use some fancy capability-based message-passing thing that somehow gives DMA to user-mode processes, but neither Windows nor Linux currently permits that. They're not designed for it at all ― it would probably be a pretty nasty efficiency drop. Every instruction sent to the video driver would require not just a mode switch, but a mode switch followed by a context switch, another mode switch, another mode switch, another context switch, and another mode switch, or something to that effect. Context switches are among the slowest operations in modern computers, taking microseconds even on multi-GHz processors.

See, for instance, this page for some benchmarks. It measures the "context switch time from a kernel space interrupt to user space-thread context", which should be somewhat under half of what it would take for a single call to a user-space driver in a monolithic kernel. It clocks it at three or four microseconds, median, for reasonably recent Linux versions (2.6). This more or less repeats what every operating systems book says: context switches are slow. Or at least that's what my OS book says, and I assume it knows what it's talking about.

And all this is on top of problems with copying buffers in userspace with no DMA, actually. Even if you had shared memory pages you'd still need the context switches, to switch to the driver process.

So no, display drivers do not run in user space, and in kernels like Windows and Linux, they probably never will. Microkernels go out of their way to make context switches and kernel traps as fast as the architecture will allow, but they're still slower than running in kernel space, and monolithic kernels would be slowed down even more. It's not practical to do a context switch for every call to a display driver. Mode switches (switching from user mode to kernel mode) are still slow, but they're quite a bit faster, and unavoidable without radically altering how processes behave (which microkernels do ― but at the price of more context switches, which is a sucker's deal as far as performance goes).

All this is why the link I gave from Microsoft's website explicitly that display drivers couldn't be migrated to user mode. Linux's user-space driver setup (introduced in the middle of last year) also is inappropriate for the same things, for mostly the same reasons. Only things that handle operations that involve so few system calls and are so slow that people won't care are helped by this ― printers, for instance. Most drivers are still in kernel space.


As for the NVIDIA and ATI widgets, what you see is not the driver. It's just a little user application they provide for you to easily adjust certain handy things. You can close or restart that, which should already tell you that it's not the actual driver: if you closed that, your monitor would immediately stop working, whether the driver is in user space or kernel space.


I have to go now. Actually I used Vista a bit and think it has some nice touches, but I'll have to share those later, I'm already running late.

[Juno]

Vista is the worst operating system I had the displeasure of using.

I was given Vista Ultimate by a friend, thinking I would be on top of the world, and I was... for a while...

Billy Gate's latest rehash of Windows installed without a hitch, actually, the setup was a lot quicker than I thought.

Still though, I had a feeling, just a small one in the back of my head that this relationship was doomed from the start...

All the data from my old computer was transfered to the new five terabyte drives quickly, but that's when I knew everything was over, my goose was cooked.

Installing Windows Vista had left me horny, and since my girlfriend was at school, I had to do something.

Suddenly, I realized what was wrong. All my pornography was corrupted...

Over five-hundred gigabytes of pure hi-definition pornographic bliss, ruined, gone.

The horror... the horror...

[Baron Thunder-ten-tronckh]

Suddenly, I realized what was wrong. All my pornography was corrupted...

Over five-hundred gigabytes of pure hi-definition pornographic bliss, ruined, gone.

The horror... the horror...

HA!
That actually made me cry I was laughing so hard.

So is it unable to be accessed at all? Ouch.. 500 GB is a fair amount.

EDIT:
But, I am buying a new computer.
It is largely for Empire, but I want to see what M2 is like at full graphics, and it shouild help satiate my desire for Empire until it's release.

But, is Vista the thing to get? I don't want to get XP and find that Empire is DX10 dependant, and nor do I want to get Vista and find M2 can't play/patch up to V1.2 that well (apparently there has been some problems with it).

[jimmy spong]

xp rulezz

why it always has to be release with billions of patches later

i mean patches are something necessary but huge bugs and malfunctioning arent

[mrmouth]

But, is Vista the thing to get? I don't want to get XP and find that Empire is DX10 dependant, and nor do I want to get Vista and find M2 can't play/patch up to V1.2 that well (apparently there has been some problems with it).

If you buy a new PC from a company like Dell, etc, your likely going to end up with Vista Home Premium. You can still find plenty of XP PC's on the market, but I know that at first PC makers were pushing Vista heavily. You kind of had to threaten to take your business elsewhere until they budged and agreed to sell you an XP PC. I don't know if thats the case any longer, statistics show that most new PC sales are still running XP.

At this point though, you might as well go with Vista. Its just plain better, from a common sense aspect as well as security wise. Service pack 1 is due out very soon, likely a matter of weeks, and that will improve performance and stability. Although I haven't had any issues with stability at all, its rock solid. XP was a whole lot different in that regard when it first hit.

I don't game on Vista, but I know many who do, and they haven't had any issues since the first few months of driver hell. Really it comes down to knowledge, but perhaps even more than that, laziness. People just don't want to problem solve issues, they would rather blast everything else instead of their incompetence.

I would have no reservations about gaming on Vista. Just make sure you have the appropriate ram to do so.

[Magic Man]

^ I get the feeling thats a true story.

Since i had a film stored on my computer, and after Vista was put on it wouldnt play anymore.

[sapi]

No windows OS has ever installed codecs by default.

Just use VLC for videos and you'll never need any

[King Edward III]

Empire will most likely use DirectX 10. So Vista is the way to go. Make sure you get at least 2gigs of RAM, though.

[Elrond]

Empire will most likely use DirectX 10. So Vista is the way to go. Make sure you get at least 2gigs of RAM, though.

tbh if you are getting a new vista comp 4 gigs is probably best - I have found some good 4gb PC6400 RAM for £70 and I am planning on buying to replace my current 2gbs - basically because its the lowest scoring part in vistas performance indicator and because Vista using 45-50% of it doing normal tasks.

Direct 10 is definatly the way to go - the are some cheap cards (ie around £50) that will run comfortable run M2TW and should run ETW on low - medium graphics - buying any kind of Direct x9 card is a waste of money atm.

I have vista ultimate and I think that its better than XP - I had a few problems when it was released but I have about the same number of problems that I had with XP. It might not be worth upgrading to but if you are getting a new computer I would recommend that you got vista with it.

[mrmouth]

Empire will most likely use DirectX 10.

Kingdoms will support both.

Direct 10 is definatly the way to go - the are some cheap cards (ie around £50) that will run comfortable run M2TW and should run ETW on low - medium graphics - buying any kind of Direct x9 card is a waste of money atm.

There are some great budget DX10 cards from both makers. You can find the 8600 for around $90 right now! A friend of mine in our building just bought one, its a great card, great overclocker.

I cant understand how people still recommend relatively expensive DX9 cards. You can grab an 8800GT for under $250 and people are still recommending DX9 cards at around $200.

[King Edward III]

Kingdoms will support both.

Kingdoms? :hm:

I was pleasantly suprised when i went to play Diablo 2, and found out blizzard had released a Vista patch for a game this old.

Seriously? Jesus.

[Magic Man]

Seriously? Jesus.

Super seriously, kinda restored my faith in Blizzard somewhat after the WoW fest.