From XP to Vista
It has been an issue for me for some time that the dual athlon was ready for decommisioning. Especially certain Adobe products as well as the installation of Internet Explorer 7 made it obvious that it was time to enter the Core2Duo era. When the PS3 was presented with a price tag og 6k NOK I seriously considered returning to the PC gaming platform a couple of years and wait for the PS3 to become cheaper. I have been waiting for a while to make sure Vista was available when I bought a new computer. I have so far never purchased an OS other that the ones that came with the computer.
A decent gaming PC cost easily 13k NOK. As I have a "hjemmePC" deal with SINTEF I was able to buy a Dell computer that cost 10080 NOK and basically pay half of that. I got a decent Dell with E6400 processor 2 GB 667 MHz RAM, a couple of 320 GB SATA drives in striping mode, Vista Home Premium and a 19" LCD. The LCD was not an issue as I have a 21" CRT EIZO I'd stick to for gaming purposes. For gaming purposes I paid up and additional 3k to replace the ATI XP1300Pro with an overclocked GeForce 8800GTS/320. At about 8K I now had a fairly decent gaming machine. This was verified by running S.T.A.L.K.E.R. at maximum detail and 1600x1200 resolution. No DirectX 10 yet, but the wait Alan Wake and Crysis should be worth the while.
So what about Vista? Since I am fairly pleased with XP Pro I put the dual Athlon in the basement for RPC access. I already knew that applications like Garmin Mapsource did not support Vista yet. The new desktop layout is of course nice but although the M-TAB now has a 3D alternative, it's really nothing of particular interest to me. The sidebar actually has a couple of gadgets that I make use of. Vista quickly took use of half my memory, so an upgrade to 4 GB will eventually be neccessary. The motherboard supports 800 MHz RAM so a full upgrade will be most likely for the future.
Apart from S.T.A.L.K.E.R., not much has actually been installed. Office 2007 is one of the applications that actually impressed me. Word looks completely different. Pretty cool, but as I am a basic user, the functionality appeared to be the same. Google Earth ran very smoothly, but made use of another .5 GB of RAM.
If you let Vista index your files there is actually a nice structure to where media files are kept. For me, using an Adobe application for digital image import and organizing it is really nice to see that you can use applications that comes with Vista to quickly find view all your fotos. The Adobe applications are still slow loading and hence quick access is beneficial. Windows Mail and Calendar looks like Outlook Express wrapped differently, but if you use Outlook that is not interesting.
The stability of the OS has so far been good. BSOD is still blue. I only experienced that when I installed the Logitech G5 gaming mouse and tried to flash the firmware. Apart from that, OS has not crashed. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. crashes every now and then, but only to the desktop. Hard to tell if there is something related to Vista or not. I originally installed the F-Secure Public Beta of Internet Security. As the reading from DVD-ROM was erraneous, I switched to avast! which has so far been working great.
All in all, I am pleased with the fact that the new computer is running Vista. It is definately neccessary to have another computer around for work and media burning. But for gaming and media Vista is ok.
A decent gaming PC cost easily 13k NOK. As I have a "hjemmePC" deal with SINTEF I was able to buy a Dell computer that cost 10080 NOK and basically pay half of that. I got a decent Dell with E6400 processor 2 GB 667 MHz RAM, a couple of 320 GB SATA drives in striping mode, Vista Home Premium and a 19" LCD. The LCD was not an issue as I have a 21" CRT EIZO I'd stick to for gaming purposes. For gaming purposes I paid up and additional 3k to replace the ATI XP1300Pro with an overclocked GeForce 8800GTS/320. At about 8K I now had a fairly decent gaming machine. This was verified by running S.T.A.L.K.E.R. at maximum detail and 1600x1200 resolution. No DirectX 10 yet, but the wait Alan Wake and Crysis should be worth the while.
So what about Vista? Since I am fairly pleased with XP Pro I put the dual Athlon in the basement for RPC access. I already knew that applications like Garmin Mapsource did not support Vista yet. The new desktop layout is of course nice but although the M-TAB now has a 3D alternative, it's really nothing of particular interest to me. The sidebar actually has a couple of gadgets that I make use of. Vista quickly took use of half my memory, so an upgrade to 4 GB will eventually be neccessary. The motherboard supports 800 MHz RAM so a full upgrade will be most likely for the future.
Apart from S.T.A.L.K.E.R., not much has actually been installed. Office 2007 is one of the applications that actually impressed me. Word looks completely different. Pretty cool, but as I am a basic user, the functionality appeared to be the same. Google Earth ran very smoothly, but made use of another .5 GB of RAM.
If you let Vista index your files there is actually a nice structure to where media files are kept. For me, using an Adobe application for digital image import and organizing it is really nice to see that you can use applications that comes with Vista to quickly find view all your fotos. The Adobe applications are still slow loading and hence quick access is beneficial. Windows Mail and Calendar looks like Outlook Express wrapped differently, but if you use Outlook that is not interesting.
The stability of the OS has so far been good. BSOD is still blue. I only experienced that when I installed the Logitech G5 gaming mouse and tried to flash the firmware. Apart from that, OS has not crashed. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. crashes every now and then, but only to the desktop. Hard to tell if there is something related to Vista or not. I originally installed the F-Secure Public Beta of Internet Security. As the reading from DVD-ROM was erraneous, I switched to avast! which has so far been working great.
All in all, I am pleased with the fact that the new computer is running Vista. It is definately neccessary to have another computer around for work and media burning. But for gaming and media Vista is ok.
Keep up the good work.
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