OS of choice for gamers

Slutmonkey57b

yoyo wrote: »

:eek: Actually the Vista start menu & explorer are far far better than that in XP, the search to open a application is brilliant

The problem is, if you attempt to use something *other* than the integrated search, it's a massive pain in the arse. And the search function is a massive resource hog, because it creates an index by scanning your system, as opposed to what it should do, namely add files to the index as part of the file creation/copy API.

The search to open an app is not the "start menu" or the "explorer".

Vista's problem is that the whole thing is arranged to suit OEM's - Everything revolves around single "areas" - like pictures, music, video, documents, all of which are part of the user profile directory on a single partition. If you don't want to use those "areas", or god forbid you have more than one hard drive, vista's explorer is a pile of absolute toss.

Provided you always do what it tells you and stick pictures in the pictures folder, video in the video folder, you'll be all right. Attempt to put your files where you want to, however and it'll do its damndest to stop you, or to irritate you into doing it another way. I don't want animated sliders to switch between folder views. I want a list of my partitions, a folder tree, and an explorer that calculates folder sizes. Vista doesn't want to show me that. It wants to do a little dance for me while I attempt to force it to let me get at my stuff.

Use any other OS's file explorer and I guarantee you it isn't as useful, intuitive, helpful, or clear as XP's. Linux ones are particularly awful.

i_am_dogboy

Matt Simis wrote: »

Vista is a annoying and clunky, but for games you have to use it. No DX10 and certain titles (more and more) for you otherwise. You dont have a choice.

No I don't, I'll just live without them

I'm not motivated enough to upgrade just for the newest super duper first person shooters, and the games I'm really into-world of goo and the likes, will run grand on my current machine under xp.

Ciaran500

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Vista's problem is that the whole thing is arranged to suit OEM's - Everything revolves around single "areas" - like pictures, music, video, documents, all of which are part of the user profile directory on a single partition. If you don't want to use those "areas", or god forbid you have more than one hard drive, vista's explorer is a pile of absolute toss.

Provided you always do what it tells you and stick pictures in the pictures folder, video in the video folder, you'll be all right. Attempt to put your files where you want to, however and it'll do its damndest to stop you, or to irritate you into doing it another way. I don't want animated sliders to switch between folder views. I want a list of my partitions, a folder tree, and an explorer that calculates folder sizes. Vista doesn't want to show me that. It wants to do a little dance for me while I attempt to force it to let me get at my stuff.

Never came up to any of these problems. I have two hard drive with 5 partitions and pictures, videos and music scattered across all of them and it just leaves me alone to do what I want with them. Biggest annoyance I've come across is the multiple confirmation dialogs to edit anything in Program files. But thats easily disabled.

yoyo

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

The problem is, if you attempt to use something *other* than the integrated search, it's a massive pain in the arse. And the search function is a massive resource hog, because it creates an index by scanning your system, as opposed to what it should do, namely add files to the index as part of the file creation/copy API.

Sure it takes a couple hours to create the index first time but I wouldnt call it a resource hog, well, if it is, it doesnt effect my pc or others I know with vista much

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

The search to open an app is not the "start menu" or the "explorer".

I don't know what you mean about that, but my Vista start menu & explorer has the quick search:
http://i38.tinypic.com/w8ug6w.jpg

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Vista's problem is that the whole thing is arranged to suit OEM's - Everything revolves around single "areas" - like pictures, music, video, documents, all of which are part of the user profile directory on a single partition. If you don't want to use those "areas", or god forbid you have more than one hard drive, vista's explorer is a pile of absolute toss.

I have 6 hard drives totalling 2.6TB and I can find stuff fine with vista search, navigate easily, actually because of the search its easier

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Provided you always do what it tells you and stick pictures in the pictures folder, video in the video folder, you'll be all right. Attempt to put your files where you want to, however and it'll do its damndest to stop you, or to irritate you into doing it another way. I don't want animated sliders to switch between folder views. I want a list of my partitions, a folder tree, and an explorer that calculates folder sizes. Vista doesn't want to show me that. It wants to do a little dance for me while I attempt to force it to let me get at my stuff.

I have downloads folders everywhere, with docs, txt files, images etc... Vistas search still finds them, So I dont understand this point

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Use any other OS's file explorer and I guarantee you it isn't as useful, intuitive, helpful, or clear as XP's. Linux ones are particularly awful.

Xp has a awful explorer version which microsoft didnt change since 95 much, vistas is much more straight forward, what I dont understand is how XPs explorer is better? The search engine is hopeless, the tasks side bar isnt useful and all the features of it are in vista anyway and mostly improved upon (The un-needed file menu can be re-activated using a reg trick afaik but it is un needed!).

Nick

Slutmonkey57b

To summarise:

yoyo wrote: »

My point: Explorer is crap.
Your response: Search is great!
My point: Search isn't Explorer. The explorer is crap and the search is engineered backwards.
Your retort: Search is great!

I think you're missing my point here. I'm not talking about Vista's search feature.
I'm talking about its explorer implementation, which is all bells and whistles, and no information.

And yes, if it takes a few hours to create the index the first time, it *is* a resource hog. If it was designed the right way round, it wouldn't have to do that in the first place.

L31mr0d

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

Vista's problem is that the whole thing is arranged to suit OEM's - Everything revolves around single "areas" - like pictures, music, video, documents, all of which are part of the user profile directory on a single partition. If you don't want to use those "areas", or god forbid you have more than one hard drive, vista's explorer is a pile of absolute toss.

Can you elaborate on this? Are you talking about search indexing? or are you talking about the right hand side of the start menu? You know you can change the location of your pictures, music, videos, documents links. Just right click and hit properties. I have my music and media on another drive so I just changed where the start menu was pointing to. This also had the nice added result of changing where the links in my profile folder pointed to also.

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

And yes, if it takes a few hours to create the index the first time, it *is* a resource hog. If it was designed the right way round, it wouldn't have to do that in the first place.

I have indexing turned off but I still find searching grand. Although I will agree that it is odd that there is no option for folder sizes, even if they didn't like how much resources it ate up at least they could of provided it as an option you could enable.

MooseJam

I use Vista64, never had any issues with it, as for the XP people who say vista is rubbish well vista IS XP just with a couple more years developement, it's not like its a whole new OS, the starting point of vista was XP

ntlbell

L31mr0d wrote: »

what I find hilarious is how cyclical this mistrust of MS OS's is. I remember it was a good while after XP got released before people where willing to let go of their Windows 2000 security blanket. Back then everyone was giving out about "its bloated interface", it's "resource hogging"... etc. All the gripes you are now hearing again from all those XP owner about Vista.

Give a year and all those people will have moved to Vista and be singing its praises getting ready with their "Down with this sort of thing" banners for the next release from MS.

Compared to the state XP was in this soon after its release, Vista is frankly amazing. Most of the time people who give out about Vista are those that believe the hype or are suffering from PEBKAC errors.

Most older applications that Vista doesn't support can be run in XP compatibility mode anyway.

The main reason people are happy with XP now is after 3 service packs just about every line of code has been re-written at this stage

if they installed Windows XP as it was when it was released it would still be a big pile of ****e.

not to mention they more than likley didn't have the power they have today so XP doesn't _feel_ as bloated as it did when they tried to install it on there k6 500mhz 128mb ram

95 took till 95b

98 till se

nt4 till sp 4-6

2k sp4

xp sp2 wasn't bad

so i don't see why it should be any different.

but for the most part without ripping off people and pulling support for older os's there was no real need for vista it doesn't add anything that couldn't of been simply rolled to xp in a sp

but that's going to bring in the bucks

there's a reason only about 6% of companies upgraded to vista in the uk....

and it's not every CTO/Sys admin is a moron.

OK-Cancel-Apply

MooseJam wrote: »

I use Vista64, never had any issues with it, as for the XP people who say vista is rubbish well vista IS XP just with a couple more years developement, it's not like its a whole new OS, the starting point of vista was XP

I don't think that's the case TBH - it's a whole different beast. There's something about it that's causing all my games to freeze and force a hard reset, whereas XP gives me no problems whatsoever!

yoyo

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

To summarise:



I think you're missing my point here. I'm not talking about Vista's search feature.
I'm talking about its explorer implementation, which is all bells and whistles, and no information.

And I responded saying it is easier to use than XP's one, has all the features you mentioned, and a decent search to boot, I have created a image to illustrate this:
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/8181/vistafolderdx7.jpg.

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

And yes, if it takes a few hours to create the index the first time, it *is* a resource hog. If it was designed the right way round, it wouldn't have to do that in the first place.

No, its the way the system was designed, don't like it it can be turned off... And how could a any decent search engine operate without creating a index database? Not only would it be slow and a "resource hog", but it possibly wouldnt include searching file data or contents as it would take too long, the search on my laptops XP is disasterous and slow, and thats only on a 80gig hard drive!, I dont mind a clean install of a os take give or take two hours to index the pc, and without causing interuptions, updating this index periodicly,

Nick

Cuddlesworth

ntlbell wrote: »

but for the most part without ripping off people and pulling support for older os's there was no real need for vista it doesn't add anything that couldn't of been simply rolled to xp in a sp

but that's going to bring in the bucks

there's a reason only about 6% of companies upgraded to vista in the uk....

and it's not every CTO/Sys admin is a moron.

Vista is inheriantly different as a OS to XP.

The way it handles process's, thread queing, multi-core apps, ram prefetching coupled with the indexing system and the new explorer, sandboxing parts of the OS, improvements in networking and filetransfer, the list goes on.

There are only a few things that xp could have handled, most of them are the things the Vista Campain is trying to sell as a reason to change, eg;Areo.

As for company's, they have always been slow to adopt anything new. I know plently that still use 2k. If its works then there is no reason for them to upgrade the OS, hardware, servers, custom written applications etc. The ones with the money, eg mine and a few big others I know are already testing our Vista corperate image, fine tuning, testing and rolling it out slowly.

5uspect

I have to agree there are some retarded things about Vista's Explorer that just annoy me. The replacement of the up directory button with the bread crumb trail has annoyed me no end. I was happy to browse up n directories without having to know the folder name, now I find myself being frustrated having to stop and do a double take to ensure I don't click the wrong folder in the trail. Why not give us a choice?

It just seems that in an attempt to make explorer more readily usable to general users they've taken out fundamental features or clumped them into a single menu just like the crap fest that is Office 2007.

I've learned to live the silly bits with explorer in Vista (alt+up and all that) but I'm not happy to have had to make such compromises with a new "better" OS.

5uspect

yoyo wrote: »

Slutmonkey57b wrote:

And yes, if it takes a few hours to create the index the first time, it *is* a resource hog. If it was designed the right way round, it wouldn't have to do that in the first place.

No, its the way the system was designed, don't like it it can be turned off... And how could a any decent search engine operate without creating a index database?

I think the point is that a clean install shouldn't need to create an index. It should come pre-indexed to some extent.

Dyr

So how do gamers feel about vistas limited number of reinstalls?

Personally i find vista was a nightmare for games on its release, it might improve as games are released that are designed with vista in mind but tbh ive disabled so many of the new features in Vista just to get my games working that i might as well be using XP.

ntlbell

Cuddlesworth wrote: »

Vista is inheriantly different as a OS to XP.

The way it handles process's, thread queing, multi-core apps, ram prefetching coupled with the indexing system and the new explorer, sandboxing parts of the OS, improvements in networking and filetransfer, the list goes on.

There are only a few things that xp could have handled, most of them are the things the Vista Campain is trying to sell as a reason to change, eg;Areo.

As for company's, they have always been slow to adopt anything new. I know plently that still use 2k. If its works then there is no reason for them to upgrade the OS, hardware, servers, custom written applications etc. The ones with the money, eg mine and a few big others I know are already testing our Vista corperate image, fine tuning, testing and rolling it out slowly.

you do realise over the 3 sp's that nearly the whole kernel has been re-written?

if your changing huge chunks of kernel code there's no reason to be not be able to add in enhancemnets

for me these are not even enhancments they are fixes..

XP handled memory pretty badly early on...

OS's that you can download for free have been doing sandboxing for decades.

A stable secure high performing network stack should be a given when your forking out a few hundred euro for what's suppose to be an enterprise networking operating system.

Looking at companies.

If you look at the adoption from nt 3.5 to 4 4 to 2k 2k to XP

compared to XP to vista is redic

Some companies don't upgrade as there's no need some are still on windows 3.1 but these stats are in there os after os

a vast majority do.

We have about 20,000 desktops and had XP tested for the move from 2k long before XP was on the shelves companies are not upgrading because they know it takes MS about 2-3 service packs now (because of expirience) to get something right, so they may aswell hold fire.

Your basically paying MS to be a beta tester so they can learn to do things other OS's have been doing for years and do it for no cost.

yoyo

Bambi wrote: »

So how do gamers feel about vistas limited number of reinstalls?

XP is the same, product activation is used in all versions of XP bar the vlk editions....

Bambi wrote: »

Personally i find vista was a nightmare for games on its release, it might improve as games are released that are designed with vista in mind but tbh ive disabled so many of the new features in Vista just to get my games working that i might as well be using XP.

I havn't needed to disable anything to play games on vista, had a couple of driver problems (Courtesy of Nvidia) however even XP was effected by this (Driver crashes). As a whole games play fine, smooth and without issiue for me, completed brothers in arms hells highway this weekend, no crashes, freezes etc...

Nick

kaimera

Bambi wrote: »

So how do gamers feel about vistas limited number of reinstalls?

Personally i find vista was a nightmare for games on its release, it might improve as games are released that are designed with vista in mind but tbh ive disabled so many of the new features in Vista just to get my games working that i might as well be using XP.

havent had to reinstall

and what sort of features?

Aside from a few tweaks to speed up vista I didnt need to disable anything to play my games.

Dyr

yoyo wrote: »

XP is the same, product activation is used in all versions of XP bar the vlk editions....

"Microsoft allows you to reinstall and reactivate windows vista on the same computer once" Thats from "configuring windows vista client", pretty sure XP didnt do that.

Stephen

I've reinstalled Vista 3 times now (due to changing from 32-bit to 64-bit and then changing motherboards) and haven't had any problems with it.

yoyo

Stephen wrote: »

"Microsoft allows you to reinstall and reactivate windows vista on the same computer once" Thats from "configuring windows vista client", pretty sure XP didnt do that.

I re-installed & activated Vista HP OEM around 4 times before upgrading to 64bit Ultimate, I did have to ring up microsoft to activate it after 2 activations but that was the same with my OEM XP license, Also from the Vista activation FAQ:

Windows can be activated any number of times, but your re-activation experience will vary based on the way you acquired Windows.

*

If you acquired Windows Vista via retail purchase (boxed product), you may activate via the Internet the first five times. Subsequent activations are allowed but must be completed via telephone.
*

If you acquire Windows Vista pre-installed on a computer, re-installation would not require additional activation steps unless significant hardware changes were made.

Nick

Sephiroth_dude

vista 32 bit :-).

Phototoxin

xp32 as not many games use 64 and until i need more than 7zillion gigs of ram (which will require an upgrade anyway) I will hang on to my xp. Oddly I had no opposition to changing to xp it was better than 2000/ME.

I dont understand how games can have crappy grapgics and yet still be resource whores. In the olden days you had very little memory to store a game on and they optimised it to death. Now they would rather have a clunky came (NWN2 anyone) and let YOU pay E200+ for a decent gfx card to run it on.

Slutmonkey57b

yoyo wrote: »

And I responded saying it is easier to use than XP's one, has all the features you mentioned, and a decent search to boot, I have created a image to illustrate this:
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/8181/vistafolderdx7.jpg.

It spends a lot of its energy attempting to prevent me from using it. I call that a bad thing. see below.

No, its the way the system was designed, don't like it it can be turned off... And how could a any decent search engine operate without creating a index database?

errr... misreading my point. Vista has a search feature because OS X has a good one. What's the difference? OSX NEVER scans your system to create its index. When a file is copied, or created, or modified, the index is automatically updated by the file system. Vista (and google desktop) by comparison, searches your whole pc, creates an index, and then leaves something running in the background, constantly scanning for changes, thereby wasting resources and slowing down your machine - all because of poor engineering. If they had stuck to their guns and gone with WinFS, they wouldn't have had this problem. It's another example of Vista cutting corners to get a "feature" out the door that wasn't ready for primetime yet.

kaimera

completely off topic cos there have been a million thread on vista in the windows forum. but tbph, in your pic, complaining about the lack of an 'up' button is silly.

clicking back on the folder in the address bar is much better than clicking up a million times to get back to where ya were.

Creamy Goodness

also the refresh is mega handy when - if you're like me - have NAS drives/shares on your machine which are being constantly updated.

yoyo

Slutmonkey57b wrote: »

It spends a lot of its energy attempting to prevent me from using it. I call that a bad thing. see below.



errr... misreading my point. Vista has a search feature because OS X has a good one. What's the difference? OSX NEVER scans your system to create its index. When a file is copied, or created, or modified, the index is automatically updated by the file system. Vista (and google desktop) by comparison, searches your whole pc, creates an index, and then leaves something running in the background, constantly scanning for changes, thereby wasting resources and slowing down your machine - all because of poor engineering. If they had stuck to their guns and gone with WinFS, they wouldn't have had this problem. It's another example of Vista cutting corners to get a "feature" out the door that wasn't ready for primetime yet.

Vista doesnt have a "Up" button due to the fact the current location bar, allows you to click on the previous directories, for example C:\[Folder1]\[Folder2]\[Folder3], all folders are buttons and can be clicked to go to parent folder. Its a little different sure, but its still possible to go back. I'm persuming the Reload button acts like refresh in XPs explorer to reload files if theyve been added, updated, modified etc...
XP Also has a favorite links in the left pane I'm sure, then the same kinda tasks "Burn to cd", "open in wmp" etc... I dont see any fault with the folder tree as sub folders are indented, I see this is logical? If your wondering about opening/collapsing the folders, a symbol appears allowing you to do so when hovering over it in the left pane,
Vista doesnt show the folder sizes alrite, Although I dont recall XP doing this either, it would be a handy addition though yes I agree.
The indexer for search never bothers me or slows the pc down... I'd rather that than having to use XPs search again :pac:

Nick

OK-Cancel-Apply

I can't fault Vista's GUI-- it's the fact that the OS doesn't like my nVidia hardware that keeps me away from it!

PogMoThoin

Cmon, The threads about operating systems and gaming, whats the Vista search or lack of an up button got to do with gaming?

Matt Simis

OK-Cancel-Apply wrote: »

I can't fault Vista's GUI-- it's the fact that the OS doesn't like my nVidia hardware that keeps me away from it!

Im running 2x 8800GTXs in SLI in Stereo3D on a Zalman Trimon on 64bit Vista (only official 32bit support), thats pretty esoteric but it works, so there should be no issue with nV hardware.

kaimera

Matt Simis wrote: »

Im running 2x 8800GTXs in SLI in Stereo3D on a Zalman Trimon on 64bit Vista (only official 32bit support), thats pretty esoteric but it works, so there should be no issue with nV hardware.

it was nvidia drivers that were the cause of ~40% of vista crashes initially wasn't it?

Not hw per se.

As a gaming OS, vista is fine. Is it better than XP? Maybe not in the sense that some old-ish games wont run but it runs games, and runs them perfectly.

'gamers' not chosing vista is for silly reasons like the indexing or the uac or some other crap; not about it's gaming performance.