I’m looking at buying a new gaming computer in the near future, and have to choose between XP and Vista. There’s no price difference in the OS choice, so should go with the tried and true XP or would Vista be more future-proof?
I like my Vista. Its run everything I’ve put it up to so far (Which, admittedly, isn’t a lot, but…) including Starcraft, Warcraft III, Rome Total War.
Well, it didn’t run Medieval Total war, but neither did my XP, so thats not saying much.
It really boils down to what you want, as the games that have been ‘vista only’ have received hacks that let them be run on XP (Halo 2 comes to mind)
I switched to Vista with my new machine a few weeks ago and haven’t had any regrets. Takes some time to learn its look and feel and ins and outs, but performance is fine and so far it’s been ok. Then again, my new machine is three times as fast as my old one so even if Vista was slow it would seem fast.
Benchmarks are a mixed bag. I’ve seen some which show XP to be faster and others to be Vista faster. It really depends on what the program is. I forgot the site I saw them on…
I switched to Vista with my new computer also, and other than having some issues with Vent that still need to be ironed out, it’s been completely fine for me.
Vista has been delicious. I played through STALKER with only a single crash. It’s been rock-solid in everything else I do, and it’s purty.
Bioshock crashes left and right, but I think that has more to do with Bioshock than Vista.
Might as well go with Vista. I’m forced to keep Vista running on one of my work machines, and the driver issues seem to be mostly resolved by now. Of course, I haven’t tried playing any games on the machine, but I have wiped the machine & reinstalled the Vista multiple times. Each time it seems like there’s more driver support out there in the intarweb.
(The reinstalls weren’t caused by Vista itself: my coding machine is the Vista box, and I need to have lots of different VM’s, language packs, etc. etc. on the machine. Inevitably, one or another update makes the machine unstable, and I need to start over.)
vistas great, but sucks on standby. if its a laptop, get xp, else get vista. i expect the standy stuff to be fixed in sp1 anyway
I haven’t had any problems with Vista Ultimate 64-bit playing games like BioShock in DX10 (or TQ, or even FO2, or…). Suffice to say, I seem to be going back to WinXP (I dual-boot) for nothing other than to remove things and bring them over to Vista.
As long as you have the hardware to match, Vista’s the way to go in my experience.
Just make sure you install the Official pre-SP1 Vista Performance & Reliability updates, and the hotfix for the DirectX excessive memory use.
Also I second the aggravating problems with standby/resume. This depends on the machine/BIOS/hardware though. On my wife’s machine it works every time, on my laptop 95% of the time, and on my home machine 50% of the time.
Ah, to be a Mac user, with only one source for all your hardware bits, OS, and software, so everything works together perfectly… it’s like a dream. An expensive 50% markup dream, but a nice one, nonetheless.
I would go with dual-booting. I am getting a new desktop on Thursday and am putting XP on a second hard drive. Vista still does gimp performance a bit on DX 9, and there’s plenty of other reasons to keep XP handy. It’s not like you don’t have an extra XP key lying around by this point, right?
Yeah, TeamSpeak is sometimes an issue, though I can’t tell if it’s the Realtek onboard audio (which FWIW sounds fabulous, and very clean), Vista’s audio system, or something else. I sometimes have to launch games and TS in a particular order to get the microphone to work. But other than that, ok.
I don’t actually. My last couple of XP machines have had an OEM OS that I’ve given away with the old machine, so buying a new XP license at this point just for dual-booting would be a bit too expensive.
Thanks for the replies everyone. I ended up buying the Vista Home Premium retail version. I could’ve bought the OEM version with the new machine too, but I figured the retail box is a safer bet if I want to upgrade the machine in the future. Especially since (if I understood correctly), the retail box includes both the 32bit and 64bit license, so I can start with 32bit Vista and install 64bit later when software support for it is more mature.
As long as you don’t mind not being able to play online, which is like 90% of the appeal of Halo 2 and Shadowrun (the only Vista-only GfW Live titles ATM), as the XP hack basically strips out the GfW Live components from both titles.
FWIW, I’ve run Bioshock on both Vista and XP (dual-boot system) and it’s definitely more stable on XP. Couldn’t tell you what’s at fault, though.
I believe Live for XP will be released soon, which should make that a moot point.
I even got system-shock 2 to run under Vista. For game compatibility, I do not think Vista is a problem.
I tried this recently but couldn’t do it. Vista wouldn’t get past the Safedisc protection (XP does fine). And the Safedisc-unlocker I tried just makes the game crash. It’s one of the few things I’ve been having to reboot into XP to play.
I have to use XP because the software Nintendo uses to get your Wii and DS online via its dongle doesn’t work in Vista at all. Vista also refused to install for me the one time I installed it until I got rid of Nero and Daemon Tools, which also broke DVD Shrink.
Has anyone gotten DVD Shrink to run in Vista? I’m sure DT and Nero have gotten versions working by now, right?
It’s something on your system, then. I’m running SS2 on my Vista box with no issues.
What did you do to get it to run? I only tried briefly, and gave up after it wouldn’t start–does just fiddling with the compatibility settings do it?