I’m still awaiting good sound drivers for my Creative Labs Audigy 2 soundcard as I the Beta drivers give me no control over SPDIF or Line In, so all I have right now is direct volume control. I also await the Vista compatible DigiTV software from Nebula Electronics, as their DigiTV tuner has been sitting here using Windows Media Center for now, which isn’t as advanced as the superb Nebula software.
I’ve had a few hassles with software compatibility. This is because I use a lot of old software which was coded years ago (pre Windows XP) so I was expecting problems anyway. My first issue was with Lotus Organiser 6.1. I’ve used Organiser since the Windows 3.1 era, it serves as my diary and a notepad and has served me well constantly through Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP and luckily it seems to work in Vista. I say this because my first few attempts at running this application resulted in the desktop going white, and then me getting a BSOD (Blue screen of death). However after a reinstall, it seems to now work fine… All my other apps work fine so far, Firefox, uTorrent, Opera, Media Monkey, mIRC, FileZilla, WinRAR, Live Messenger to name a few.
However I’m having less luck with older games although I’ve been expecting this too. Games during the XP era were coded to utilise DirectSound in DirectX9 and since Vista hasn’t got this (it has Direct X10 and the Wave sound engine) they’re likely to cause problems, even though Vista is backwards compatible with DirectX9 titles to an extent. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City has an issue. Vice City runs and plays fine but since I have dual screens, there’s one problem. It runs on a single screen, and the mouse cursor should have exclusive lock to that screen, however in Vice City it flies off the main screen onto the second!
San Andreas, which is the newest of the GTA series fares a bit better. Upon running this title, I see the Rockstar and Nvidia logo, but can’t see the intro video playing even though I can hear the audio. Everything else from this point onwards is fine.
Other games that run without problems:
- Age of Empires III
- Age of Empires III - The Warchiefs
- FarCry
- Max Payne 2
- Sim City 4000 Deluxe
- Dawn of War
- Command & Conquer: Zero Hour
- Need for Speed: Underground
So, why are people complaining?
Windows XP users have had life easy for so long, and against the competition (Linux and the Mac’s OSX) it’s looking quite dated and out of shape. No matter how popular Windows XP is, you cannot deny the fact that the competition has a lot of features that we could really benefit from. One could state that you could simply use Third Party apps to add functionality to XP, but at what cost? Luckily Vista has now given us the opportunity to experience this.
Vista does currently have its disadvantages I do admit. Gaming right now is slower than on Windows XP; however this is expected. Gamers are saying XP is miles better for gaming, well that’s a bit obvious there - a 6yr old OS vs. a 1 month old one without any decent drivers, it’s a bit obvious who’s going to win there isn’t it? Give it six months and watch them wince as Vista’s graphics drivers fully mature. Most spoilt gamers fail to realise that Vista utilises a completely different Graphics & Sound API compared to past versions of Windows. With time, Vista will blow XP to pieces in the speed stakes. Even with the current Nvidia Beta drivers, Vista already feels miles faster and smoother to use for file management operations and internet browsing then on XP.
Another chief complaint is that Vista is too memory hungry. Another silly comment as I’ve seen people running Vista on mid end PC’s and Laptops with just 1GB of ram. It’s still smooth and silky to use. 1GB is my recommended minimum amount of ram to have though, if you have less then stick to Windows XP or even Windows 2000. As for Vista’s memory management, users state that they have no free ram once the OS is up and running. Now this is intentional - Vista is supposed to leave you with no free memory, this is not a bug, this is not poor coding - this is how the OS works. Linux and OSX have been doing this for some time now. Any spare ram gets taken aside and used as a massive cache for applications and games.
Microsoft have given us a superb OS, which looks great, runs superbly on modern machines and has innovative new technologies which we all will benefit from in some way or another. Right now users are let down by lazy driver vendors who have had Vista for around 9 months now and still can’t even come up with remotely decent drivers (hint hint Creative). There’s no excuse for not providing functional drivers at this stage. Users have been beta testing Vista for a long time now, so there’s no excuse really. Over time, driver support for Vista will smoothen out, and even better - 64bit drivers will be commonplace, which can only be a good thing as Vista x64 will really get its chance to finally take off.