Up until now, I have never really, truly gotten deep into Vista. Played with the beta some, fiddled with release candidates, and touched a retail copy once or twice, but I had never really got to spend more than a half hour or so with it per go. Well, my CS department finally realized that the reason why they weren't getting Vista discs from MSDN was because they had signed up for digital distribution. And after that, they promptly got me a key. Just in time for the summer, too! I figured I'd write a journal on my experiences installing it on a system that was shiny and new...three years ago. 17 May, 2007 - In a relative miracle, my disc takes the key, and everything is off to the races that evening. I tell it to install before heading for bed, and dreams of flying windows danced in my head. 18 May, 2007 - Finish up the installation and take off! I boot into the glorious 16-bit 800x600 default resolution for the generic video driver, with a lovely mirror on my second monitor. Vista's already running updates, and I start installing all the necessary programs (Trillian, WinAmp, Steam, etc., etc. Hey, I'm not planning on doing too much developing over the summer!). I disable UAC, because I know what the fuck I'm doing. I leave the computer to be, as I have a social life to attend to! Shocking, innit? 19 May, 2007 - I fire up HL2 to test just how EEEEVIL and slow Vista will make my game. It goes to a black screen, then, well, it just kinda sits there. For a very long time. I give it the three-finger salute, and start fiddling. For the next fucking day. To top it all off, I realized that I had forgotten to back up my porn before wiping my drive. Fuck. And a half. 20 May, 2007 - After screwing around with driver after driver for an obscure laptop chipset, I'm close to giving up. Just nuking it and throwing XP back on there. But...well...I'm a tenacious bastard. I search around Google to no avail - "only get black screen when running half life 2" is a really, really shitty search query. And all the while, I'm fucking around with restarting the audio services because they keep dropping out. I, however, manage to install Mafia and play that for a while, so I get to kill some fucking gangsters in the 30s. 21 May, 2007 - After finishing a late-night game of Mafia, I realize that my sound issues and my gaming issues might be related - this had happened in the past on an XP computer I had worked on back at my old job. I search out some newer audio drivers (though my manufacturer does not provide any, I found some from some HP thing that worked once I forced them). Voila! I have audio that actually works, and HL2 loads and plays. It loads, it plays, and all without any detectable difference in playability from my XP load. After this victory, I start the journal. Go me! In summary of my first few days - whew! Can't say that I would recommend this to a lot of folk, especially those who aren't technically inclined, but I never really did that anyway. I can't say that a three-year-old computer is really a prime candidate for Vista in the first place anyway.
I have Vista on 2 machines now. The more powerful one had the only issue I've found, it needed a new driver for the Lan card (Took me 3 days to find a beta version online) Other than that it's fine. This whole business very much reminds me of what happened at the change over from Win 98 to XP. Everyone scrambling around to find out what does and doesn't work.
I'm finding Vista to be just dandy, and not all that different from XP for usability. I'm sure there are significant and worthy differences under the hood, but all the talk about learning curve is just talk, IMO. The average user will find it no more or less bewildering than XP. I first thought it sucked balls, but it turned out that it was the Norton trial that sucked balls. I killed it, and Vista finally roared to life.
Well, every time I close the lid on my laptop, WHAM!, bluescreen. MS claims its a problem with my display driver. I have a feeling ATi would claim it's a problem with Vista's ACPI support. Either way, it doesn't look like it's terribly fixable, so I'm trying to figure out a workaround.
I'm having problems with ATI drivers as well Kyle. What happens to me, is that it (the driver) tries to throttle the fan on my X1950Pro (while playing a game) and the screen will go black for a second or two, then show back up. If you go back out to the desktop you'll notice that atiakkvd (or something close to that name) had stop responding and needed to restart. The fix I found for this is to install ATI Tool Beta 0.27 and set my VCard fan speed to a fixed 100%. After I did that, I haven't had the problem since. Others I've read about complained about the BSOD, but don't get it now that they have the Catalyst 7.4 drivers installed. So, I can't blame MS for a problem with ATI and their crappy drivers. What sucks is I thought ATI got over that stigma from a few years ago. Their drivers had been superb, at least IMO, for a good long while. Now, I'm either going to wait for a new set of drivers, which should come anytime now.. or just bite the bullet and buy an 8800GTS. I really don't want to buy a new video card yet, though.. I'm waiting for ATI and Nvidia to get more competitive with Dx10 hardware.
ATi's coming out with the Radeon 2900 XT. From what I've read, both cards have only mediocre performance/price.
The problem is that my ATi card is old. An ATI Radeon 9100, a very rare chipset. Basically, ATI stopped updating drivers for it at Catalyst 6.4 or so. In other words, long before Vista. And unfortunately, I doubt that anyone will be hacking together any drivers that'll fix this issue any time soon, especially since it has basically been forsaken by ATi. Very disappointing, but not the fault of Vista.
\ The 9100 is a quite common chipset actually since it was used as the onboard video for a lot of motherboards.
That's odd - I can find a lot on the 9000, and the 9200, but the 9100 seems to kind of be left out in the cold. In any case, there's still the problem.
Both mainboard and video drivers are up to date. Even updated the sound drivers for fun and excitement!
