Giving Vista Another Go
March 25, 2007
Ok, I'm giving Vista another go. I've re-arranged my hard disks such that I have a sizable chunk of available space in my main workstation - so I've decided to do a dual boot situation. Vista for "work" and XP for games.
So... how's it going so far? Interesting. I had to re-install Vista already because I made the OS partition too small. Eight gigabytes is not enough to hold Windows Vista. Jesus Christ, XP only takes 2.61G - and don't get me started on 98.
Additionally, Vista consumes 25% more memory than XP. Wow. No wonder I couldn't game with it.
If anyone has had issues, please let me know in this thread! I work in IT and want to know every last morsel of failure that comes with Vista.
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18 Comments
| Tagged: Vista, Computing
James 2007/03/25
Jordan, the increased memory 'usage' is normal. It's a new prefetching feature that MS is calling "SuperFetch". It's apparently designed to predictively and preemptively cache relevant program data to improve loading time, and anything else wanting the memory space that it's taking up does get immediately released for the program requesting the additional memory. AnandTech did up a fairly interesting article about Vista's performance. (See: http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=2)
Jordan T. Cox 2007/03/26
Ah, I see James. I shall have to run 3dmark on both partitions and compare.
Jordan T. Cox 2007/04/03
I've had an issue[0] with Vista randomly dropping off the network, but after the first DHCP renewal everything seems fine.
[0] http://phantomdata.ath.cx:8081/post/show/238
madderhatter 2007/04/03
I've ran into a problem I've yet to figure out and there appears to be others with the same problem. I'm running two Vista Ultimate boxes at home and doing large file copies across a 100Mb network is painfully slow, ~16k a second. No problem at all with XP. I've checked all the obvious (NIC drivers, AV software, etc.) and the internet connection is fine at a smokin' 18Mb/768k. Saw your post on LifeHacker by the way. :-)
madderhatter 2007/04/03
Crap, sorry about that double. Itchy clicky finger.
Jordan T. Cox 2007/04/03
madderhatter; I took care of your double-post. Don't worry about it.
I'm curious, is this a problem that you're experiencing transferring between Vista Ultimate and Vista Ultimate? Or is it between Vista Ultimate and some other OS? With the same two machines have you tried transferring using another protocol, like FTP? Maybe even setting up a simple Apache installation would give you some more information. This is a curious issue.
Thanks for following over from Lifehacker, btw. Always nice to get feedback on stuff like this.
airstrike 2007/04/16
flash doesn't work with IE 64-bit (not even manual install). many many programs don't work with vista (alcohol 52%/120%, speedfan), not to mention games (mafia simply doesn't work, games like counter-strike: source gets much lower fps). not to mention vista is using up 700mb or more of my ram even when i have -hardly anything- open. by hardly anything i mean having only the windows sidebar open. overall, i like the looks, i hate the inside. i'm keeping it installed but i guess i'm back to xp after setting up dual-booting, at least until sp1 comes along.
cheers.
(btw, you have 'urI' for a field on the comments instead of 'urL')
James 2007/04/16
I don't mean to sound condescending or anything, but a few of your statements aren't quite accurate. Alcohol 120% is working fine here. From your comment on flash, I assume you're running 64-bit, so your problem is more likely Alcohol 120%'s virtual drive not installing if the driver is not digitally signed, as to my knowledge Vista 64-bit denies any non-signed driver. Your RAM comment has already been addressed, and is normal behavior; Vista will release it if a program wants it. On top of all that, contrary to what I hear from other people, I still have never had any problem with any of the games I have. My guess with some of them has to do more with how the program wants to draw to the screen. Vista handles it's own GUI radically differently from previous versions of Windows, (see my previous posts about the overlay surface) and it's no surprise to me that it has caused a few incompatibilities along the way. All things considered, I have yet to come across any compelling reason to make the effort to go back to XP.
James 2007/04/16
Oh, and URI is just as valid as URL. The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Identifier) does a fairly decent job of explaining the difference.
Jordan T. Cox 2007/04/16
*cough* Quake 1 *cough* Granted, it's not worth going back to XP for. :)
I have noticed that there is a pretty big FPS difference in some games and a little difference in most. I keep XP around for gaming, since it is (at this point) superior. Cossacks 2, BattleField 2 and Mark of Chaos come to mind as having drastic FPS differences from Vista to XP.
airstike; Thanks for the contribution. James pointed out the 64-bit driver issue, which I had no idea about. That's going to suck for hardware vendors. James' point about the RAM is a good one, and I trust him on this - but it's still hard to get over when you look at your RAM to see it all eaten up. You would imagine that they would have decided to adjust perfmon to ignore the pre-caching area.
James 2007/04/16
Right, forgot about Quake 1. But as I remember, all it took to fix it was me hosting the game instead of you.
Jordan T. Cox 2007/04/16
Ah yes, we did get Quake 1 running. I forgot. I played Doom with Andy two weekends after... heh. Ah, classic gaming...
Rick Henderson 2007/06/26
I also found you on Lifehacker, but I don't normally read it. I work in IT and have been testing Vista Home Premium (it came pre-installed on our new machines) and I've had a lot of problems with it. I recently blogged about problems with Quicktime (the link I posted with this comment) and had a few other experiences (ie: nothing by Adobe runs on Vista yet).
Wondering what experience people have with Vista Home Premium versus Ultimate... is VHP going to go the way of Windows ME? :P
Also reminds me of how XP Home is crippled in some sort of wierd way that XP Pro never has problems with.
Jordan T. Cox 2007/06/27
I have had issues with Quicktime too. I noticed that it liked to lock up and leave the system using Aero Basic until the next reboot. I've never liked Quicktime though. From your blog posting, it sounds like the initial Vista install was fubarred or locked down too tightly. I've gotten Quicktime and iTunes to install fine, granted Quicktime hates me.
Wrt to Adobe products... Adobe fucked up their installer lately and doesn't seem to care. You can check out their forums for lots of complaints, but for the most part their installers seem to just sit there and do absolutely nothing ad infinitum. We've had issues on 2000, XP and Vista.
I've been running VHP at home since I originally made this post, and really haven't run up against many major issues. Once everything was all patched up it seems fine. Perhaps it all depends on the machine? Have you tried re-installing the OS on your pre-installed machines? I know a lot of computer vendors love to screw with stuff that they shouldn't.
Brandon 2007/08/27
Hi, im new at the dual-boot thing. I have a pre-loaded Vista but want to add XP. My pc came with a 2nd hard drive (10Gb) just for recovery. Can I just put XP on that drive? Either way; can I read files I worked on in one OS, in the other OS? If I cant use the other hd like that, how big do I have to partition it to use XP?
Jordan T. Cox 2007/08/27
@Brandon; The easiest way to get a dual-boot Vista solution is to install XP and then perform the install from there selecting to maintain the existing partition when prompted. As far as I know, the default settings for Vista's filesystem allow for XP to read Vista's files and vice versa.
As for XP's partition size, I recommend at least 4 Gigabytes if not up to six. I know, it sounds like a lot - but the base install is around 1.5Gigabytes with more getting piled on for every update. I believe that the service packs increase install-size by at least a gigabyte - not to mention all the updates. You'll kick yourself later if you go too small at first. You can e-mail me if you want some one-on-one help. Phantomdata on the server gmail in the commercial domain.
Brandon 2007/09/13
Jordan, just letting you know, I used Microsofts' Virtual PC 2007 & loaded XP Pro on it. It works amazing! Just have to make the virtual hard drive with plenty of room, or you'll have to start over. Thanks
Jordan T. Cox 2007/09/13
Good to hear Brandon! Glad I could be of service.