Save yourself the grief and trouble and get an auxiliary PC! The solution involves some cash sure, but what the hell man. 2nd hand PC-stuff is not that expensive these days and it is a fool-proof solution as long as you get the right GFX-card and use win2K or XP 32bit as OS for the sake of drivers - you can't fail. 2K seems to be the best OS for MTW in my experience.
If you already got some old spare parts it is unlikely that it will cost you more then some 100 Euros in total, all inclusive (monitor, speakers, keyboard and mouse you already got. If not, then it is cheap to get some basic PS2-mouses etc. anyhow). Get decent gamewise and play some MTW! You know you want too. Why bother with Vista at all since it will obviously only screw things up for you anyhow? Nah, time to settle this once and for all…
The totally “MTW-foolproof” ATI-cards are as follows:
Model (Motherboard standards)
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X850 series (AGP/PCI-E)
X800 series (AGP/PCI-E)
Radeon 9800 XT (AGP)
Radeon 9800 Pro (AGP)
Radeon 9700 Pro (AGP)
These are the ones you really want for your auxiliary-MTW rig. However, any ATI Radeon 128MB/256Bit card prior to the release of the X850-series are likely to be safe as well I would imagine. Now, why should you accept Vistas nonsense and CA’s neglect? Use old Catalyst drivers and play the game as it was meant to be played (3-5 sec loading-times). Personally I use Radeon 9800 Pro cards, Catalyst 3.7 drivers (anything between 3.0-3.8 will do for those) and win2K.
I actually have a stash of 4 Radeon 9800 cards - just to be ridiculously safe indefinitely. At least get 2 cards to be totally sure that you can play MTW for an extremely long time to come - regardless what CA does. This way you can ignore them back indefinitely – and is that not a nice change?
Seriously, isn’t it time to stop this all this nonsense with Vista and all MTW-fuss? Get a dedicated auxiliary rig and get rid of the problem once and for all – a 100 euros later (all included probably) and this fuss will be dust….
- Cheers
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If you can’t build a rig on your own – then hire somebody who can and who needs some cash.