Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Greetings from Vista

I just upgraded to Vista Beta 2 a couple of days ago and have been pleasantly surprised so far -- it's come a long way in the last year. Graphics card definitely makes a big difference -- I'm running a Radeon 9800 on a 1.6 GHz P4 with 512 MB of RAM and and a REALLY old 20 MB hard disk, and the performance is actually pretty decent. It sure does like that disk drive, as others have said, although obviously more RAM or a non-stone-age drive would help.

The performance ratings are funny -- my graphics card gets a "5.8" and nearly everything else is under "2", so WinSAT grudgingly gave me a "2" for the whole system and turned on the AeroGlass interface.

In windows XP I have a separate page file partition set up - about 2 gigs or so.

I think with Windows Vista that would help even more so than with Windows XP, especially with file fragmentation. I need to buy some DVD-R's to burn in by brand spakin' new DVD burner, then I'll see.

What i've learned with vista is to install it on a COMPLETELY different hard drive if you plan on dual booting with XP. And, when you install it, unplug your XP drive. That way, it wont mess with any booting options and commandere your XP's boot.ini. I had that happen, wasn't fun when I wanted to nuke Vista after I was done playing with it (back then it was beta 1).

The boot.ini is pretty easy to edit yourself. It's just a text file that tells your computer what partitions it can find bootable OSes on.

Yea, it did something else though, I edited it so that no mention of Vista was in there, and somehow it kept popping back. Did something to some Win XP file I think.

The NT boot.ini is dead... if you dual boot XP and Vista this file does nothing.

I haven't spent much time trying to figure it out, but Vista is using something else... perhaps its in the MBR now.

So... like... greetings from XP again

I really liked the AeroGlass interface and didn't begrudge it sucking up >10% of my 1.6GHz CPU, although I could live without the new Start menu. A surprising number of XP utilities and drivers worked OK as long as you set "Compatibility with XPSP2" properties on the installer and sometimes the installed app.

Having fast, reliable hibernation was nice, but one of the ways it hibernates fast is by not bothering to ask the device drivers "so, like, are you able to hibernate or will you be dead when I come back ?". As a result, I didn't figure out that my modem driver couldn't hibernate for a while.

Performance was OK on a 512MB system as long as I didn't load sound card drivers and didn't try to do too much at once. The killer for me, though, was the fact that I couldn't get a working VPN client to run under Vista -- I think Nortel is waiting to see if Microsoft actually ships it before doing any work on the VPN client ;(