To Vista or not to Vista?

[zallison]

Yeah, I've noticed a lot less memory leak induced BSODs since I've moved to Vista.

Although, when I do get a memory leak, its a beast.

I was playing Hellgate London back in November, and it leaked on me, causing 99% of my physical RAM to be active, all of which was tied to the game I had just shutdown.

[nihil]

Hi Folks,

Well, I upgraded the NVIDIA GeForce2 PCI 64Mb graphics card to a GeForce 6200A with 256Mb of DDR2. The other machine has an ATI HD2400PRO with 256Mb of DDR2.

I have been looking at this "Windows Experience Index" thingy............ the machine with the Athlon XP 2400+ and a 266MHz FSB with 1Gb of PC2100 (DDR266) has a rating of 3.0

The machine with a 400MHz FSB, an Athlon 3000+ and 1.5Gb of PC3200 (DDR400) has a rating of 3.2

MS have suggested that you need a rating of 3.0 or better to get the full "experience", so I guess that I am seeing what there is to see.

Comparing the two, with the lower end machine first, I get:

CPU 3.4/3.6
RAM 3.4/4.1
Graphics 4.3/5.3
Games 3.0/3.9
HDD 5.1/3.2

Most of that I can understand?

1. The 2400+ actually runs at 2.01GHz whilst the 3000+ only runs at 2.17GHz. OK the faster one has more cache as well so a 6% difference seems somewhat low?

2. The RAM is strange (to me) in that both systems are balanced as far as FSB and RAM speeds are concerned, but the difference (as reported) is quite small.

3.The two graphics values seem reasonable as I think that one of the MoBos only supports AGP 4x rather than 8x

4. The HDD is weird. A Western Digital 60Mb, 7200rpm seems to outperform a new Maxtor 160Gb, 7200rpm ?????????????

Moira,

Please check out your sound drivers if you have AC97. Some of them are incompatible and I am told that SP1 won't load if it detects them.

[Moira]

They're SB Audigy .... I'm not particularly worried whether SP1 installs or not tbh! However, I'm going to slipstream it into my install of Vista as I plan to reinstall the laptop's copy soon and I know this made a huge difference to the number of updates that I had to download when I sot SP2 slipstreamed into XP. Hopefully slipstreaming into Vista will be easier than it was with XP when the idea first came out - I know you can do it now a hell of a lot more easily than I did it ages ago.

[nihil]

Hi Moira,

For slipstreaming XP and Win2000 I have been using nLite:

http://www.nliteos.com/

and have had excellent results. They do a Vista version called vLite that is probably still in Beta............... I have not tried it, hell I am such a newb I haven't even registered my copies of Vista yet!

Yes, it is still in Beta, the link is here:

http://www.vlite.net/

//Off Topic:

Windows XP and slipstreamed to SP2?

Had one the other day like that...............the guy had done a repair install when his system got screwed up by uninstalling crapware

He had spent ages downloading the updates (there must be around 100?) and they just wouldn't install..............

I was given the machine to have a go at, because he didn't want to do a fresh install...............

The solution is this:

1. Open a programming text editor (Notepad will do).

2. Type in these lines:

regsvr32 /s wuapi.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng1.dll
regsvr32 /s wuaueng.dll
regsvr32 /s wucltui.dll
regsvr32 /s wups2.dll
regsvr32 /s wups.dll
regsvr32 /s wuweb.dll

3. Then save the file as a .cmd and run it

Your updates will then install.

//

Back to Vista:

I just had a thought as to part of the reason the two video cards are so different in the ratings. The ATi one certainly recognises the make and model of the display unit............ Vista does not?