Damn Vista

[Evil Jeff]

I've been running Vista at home for over a year now, and so far, I've really had no problems to speak of. About the only thing I use my home system for is work through Citrix, and games. And all in all, it's run fine, with just one exception. Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance. Never could get that one to run, so I just wrote it off.

Well, fast forward to the last couple weeks, and I've gone on a Metal Gear bender, starting with the very first one. And now I'm up to MGS2, and would prefer to play the "complete" edition of the game (IE Substance) instead of the regular one. So, I've decided this is one defeat I need to reverse, and it hasn't been fun.

Did some research, and it turns out it has to do with the way Vista utilizes drivers for integrated sound cards for older games. Tried fiddling with the driver a bit, and ended up continuously crashing Vista to the point that I had to uninstall the sound card. So, instead of trying to reinstall it (which was a PITA the first time around), I "borrowed" a SoundBlaster Live! card I've had sitting on my desk at work, and wouldn't you know it, it's taking me over an hour to download the damn driver package from Creative's website.

I guess there really are some battles you just can't win.

 

[gearsoup]

I've got Vista on my home computer (I sold my XP machine to my shop), I haven't even tried loading any games on it yet.

EJ, what is a good e-mail program to use, same goes for web browsing. Is the Vista stuff good enough, or are there better ones out there?

Also, how do I get my e-mails off of my XP machine and bring them into Vista?

Any good sites to tweak Vista, make it less of a system hog?

 

[Geist]

browser = firefox obv. :

:

EJ, have you considered just setting the machine up to dual boot?

I absolutely despise Vista, so I'll stick w/ xp.... however some of the newer games (DX10) are supposedly going to need vista, unless l337 h4x0rz give us the loop holes we want (in time, mind you), I'm going to have to dual boot to play Crysis and mebbe uk2k7

 

[Redline]

Can you dual boot a Vista machine? If so, that opens a whole new can of worms, I'm sure.

 

[Geist]

Can you dual boot a Vista machine? If so, that opens a whole new can of worms, I'm sure.

Doesn't really open any cans, aside from the fact that you could accidentally click on booting vista which is a mistake in the first place.

 

[Redline]

HA HA! NICE!

 

[Evil Jeff]

I've got Vista on my home computer (I sold my XP machine to my shop), I haven't even tried loading any games on it yet.

EJ, what is a good e-mail program to use, same goes for web browsing. Is the Vista stuff good enough, or are there better ones out there?

Well, the main reason I'm running it is for work, so I'll have a better handle on it when we enivitably begin upgrading to it. So, in a sense, I'm forced to use company software. I use Office 2007 for email (which I rarely use anyway, I just use my GMail at home), and IE7 for internet browsing. They get the job done for me, so I see no reason to look into other stuff anyway.

Also, how do I get my e-mails off of my XP machine and bring them into Vista?

With porting your email over, it all depends on what type of email service you use. More likely than not, you use POP, so all you would have to do is go into your mail program, export the emails to a PST file, throw that onto a black CD or flash drive, then import it on the new system.

Any good sites to tweak Vista, make it less of a system hog?

Again, this isn't something I get into a lot, mainly because my home system is pretty beefy and runs pretty well. In fact, my work system is nearly identical (processor speed is the only difference between the 2), and I run XP on it, and I see really no difference between the 2. The only reason I'm even attempting this (which I did kind of fix, see below) is because I wanted to play the game. However, I have heard that turning the Aero features off will help a lot, but I haven't even played with those much either. My honest recommendation for everyone anyway, regardless of OS, is to get as much RAM as you can. It's cheap these days, and goes a long way.

 

[Evil Jeff]

EJ, have you considered just setting the machine up to dual boot?I absolutely despise Vista, so I'll stick w/ xp.... however some of the newer games (DX10) are supposedly going to need vista, unless l337 h4x0rz give us the loop holes we want (in time, mind you), I'm going to have to dual boot to play Crysis and mebbe uk2k7

So far, I like Vista. Not really anymore than XP, but I think it's better than most people are making it out to be. Besides, this same thing happened when XP was released. It just seems to me that people are against MS forcing a change on people by basically abandoning XP more than anything. Once you get used to it, it's a pretty good system. Either way, it's better than Alleycat or whatever Mac is on now.

Anyway, yeah, I considered the dual boot option. But to do it right, it would require me to rebuild the Vista partition, which I don't feel like doing right now, and would also require me to buy a bigger Raptor hard drive, which I also don't feel like doing right now. So, I came up with a plan B, since the more I researched, the quicker I came to realize that MGS2 simply win't run on Vista. I grabbed my spare 40GB SATA drive from work last night, and in about an hour, and it installed and WinXP running on it, which was less time than I spent trying to get it to run on Vista. Then when I'm done with MGS2 in a week or so, I'll dump my Vista Raptor back in, and it'll be business as usual. Then maybe I can get back to Bioshock. :