S.SubZero

The 7900GS Go in my E1705 died a while back. I ended up buying a 7950GTX Go for a M1710 XPS off eBay (for $400.. sheesh) and slapping that in. It was fairly easy, tho it did require snapping some plastic off the casing to get the card in due to the second heatpipe. Of course this was all just before the big reveal that the nVidia chips from around that time had problems, so for all I know the 7950GTX will blow up too. It's a spare laptop on an infinite Craigslist rotation so I don't ever use it.

Look at Vista's Task Manager. Observe the areas I marked in red. These are "cache". Observe the areas I marked in blue. These are "used." Vista differentiates cached RAM (ie. Superfetch) from used RAM. So yes, when Vista is "using" a gig of RAM, it really us using a gig of RAM, in addition to whatever it's caching. This is easily testable by simply disabling Superfetch. The cached RAM will plummet, but the used RAM won't.

If you have an honest, unremoveable reliance on a DOS application, in the year 2008, then you have some legacy issues that are outside the bounds of the conversation. Today it's hard to justify not going to x64-based systems simply because of DOS. You may as well say "well my video card can't output to a CGA monitor so I'll never get a new video card." It's silly. The vast majority (99.9%) of users have no need for 16-bit app support. 16-bit apps officially died years ago. You can google it, but in simplest terms it creates a virtual computer that runs on your desktop. You have a window, and that window is it's own functional computer. It has a BIOS, a set of virtual hardware, it loads an OS, and it exists in a "sandbox" independent of the real PC. It's awesome technology. It takes a bit of a beefy system to really take advantage of it (lots of RAM and hard disk mostly) but it is a cool and interesting way to try out different operating systems and apps without affecting your system.

The problem may be the lack of easily available XP32 drivers for the hardware. They probably exist, but Acer, like other OEMs, may not have them easily available for download. For the OP I would recommend scanning Device Manager and finding the network card and video card models and finding XP drivers for them first. As for Vista 32.. *cringe*..

Google also says... http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=36079 I would see if looking up that error on MS's website would provide a fix.

There is no way to use 32-bit drivers in Windows x64.

I would love to see your Geekbench scores. I'm fairly certain the most value-built "newer PC" (assuming all the 'newer PCs' you've seen are all Walmart specials) would be faster than a G4 600. I had a silver door G4 1.25Ghz tower in 2002 and the P4 2.4 I had at the time totally destroyed it in every possible way, even with Apple's goofy ads trying to tell the opposite. There will likely never be a 10.4.12, and while the G4 is "still supported", it's only in a grandfathered way. The G4 was made for quite a while, since there were no G5's in notebooks. They went from the G4 right to the Core Duo. For the record, on a brand new install of Windows 2000, TODAY, there are plenty of available updates, right up to the August 2008 malicious software scanner. Windows 2000 still gets updates, it's understood XP won't be going anywhere anytime soon. Ironically my Macbook Pro is a little more glitchy than my Vista laptop. There's a "missing keystroke" problem which is widely known and discussed at length on Apple's discussion forums. When I first got it, I also had problems with stuttery and popping sound, which seemed to get fixed in 10.5.3 tho there's nothing mentioned about it. The trackpad, while very nice with two-finger scroll, has a very nasty habit of registering ANY touch as a click, even with "ignore accidental input" checked. I have to watch where I leave the pointer, lest I accidentally click something I shouldn't. My Macbook Pro is very slick, but there's no doubt that they willingly sacrificed some things in order to get the final product. With Apple there's always this feeling that "people will buy it anyway, we'll fix the little things next time around and then they'll buy that one too."

I'm curious about the average specs of the group in the "sticking to XP" category. I can see keeping XP on an older machine; I just re-did my roommate's laptop which is an old (my old) Inspiron 9100, P4 2.8Ghz, 1GB RAM, 60GB hard drive. The hard drive is kinda small for Vista, the other specs are very borderline. That's an XP machine really. The choice would be more clear if it was "Do you run XP because you want to, or because you have to?"

Wow you sound really upset. You also have not stated a single thing about Vista that makes it comparable to Windows ME. For the record, I currently run Vista x64 on five machine: Gaming rig: Business x64 Core 2 Duo E8400 3Ghz processor Intel DP35DP motherboard 8GB (4x2GB) DDR2 RAM (Mushkin value stuff) nVidia 8800GT video card using onboard Sigmatel audio Activity/gaming laptop: Ultimate x64 Core 2 Duo T9300 2.5Ghz processor Intel PM865 chipset 4GB DDR2 RAM nVidia 8800M GTX video onboard Realtek audio Test Laptop: (varies, I nuke it regularly) Dell Inspiron E1705 Core 2 Duo T7200 2Ghz processor Intel PM945 chipset (I think) 2GB DDR2 RAM nVidia 7950GTX Go video chipset (which I installed myself, destroying the warranty) onboard Sigmatel audio Work Machines #1 and #2: Enterprise x64 Name brand desktops Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz Intel Q35 chipset 4GB DDR2 RAM Onboard Q35 graphics onboard SoundMAX audio Five machines. Four of which have fairly varied components. The two work machines are used by a group, so there's lots of profiles and apps and whatever else installed on them. I have to keep telling people not to install <popular bloated 32-bit app> because I already installed <cool 64-bit native freeware/open source lightweight app> that does the same job. Ugh. All five of these machines run FLAWLESSLY. When I say that, I mean it. They don't blue screen. They don't hang. They don't "app not responding". They don't drop off the network. They don't glitch, or make me think "I should reboot" or anything like that. They run perfectly. Period. They get rebooted for updates. That's it. The work machines especially impressed me, seeing as my coworkers have utterly destroyed the XP boxes with their 9000 installs of Google Talk and Realplayer and Quicktime and every other stupid app there is. The Vista boxes seem to take it all in stride. As far as speed, Vista x64 runs very well for me on all of these. My gaming rig is very cool, I have some pretty fast-paced games (ie. GRiD) on it and they fly. GRiD is very, very pretty. And it cheats so very, very badly. But anyways, it runs smooth as silk. Do many of you even remember how ME ran? That was years ago, I'm sure anyone here under 20 either never used it or only remembers it as a pre-teen. It really wasn't as bad as people make it sound.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc709618.aspx

nVidia and ATI both have their downloadable drivers 'tweaked' not to work with laptops. I've never understood why, as they would otherwise work fine. The laptopvideo2go site has the hacked INF files needed to get the regular drivers to install, or see if your laptop maker has Vista x64 drivers of their own they recommend.

You should re-do those screenshots *without* a custom theme. Those things are well-known for their oddness and are immediately suspect.

Kinda old post, and very off the original topic. http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2245 My personal experience reflects the writer of above article. Server 2008 did nothing special for me, and only proved to be a hassle. Once I turned on desktop experience, hacked in the Aero cursor theme, tweaked things to be how I like them, and looked at it.. I had Vista. It benched like Vista, it played like Vista, it ran just like Vista. I'm very curious about how you and other "WS2008" people are comparing Vista installs that may have been old RTM installs with early drivers on possibly underpowered hardware compared to Server 2008 a year later, when drivers have matured and hardware has increased in power (and decreased in cost) substantially. For me, since I have two identical SATA hard drives for my laptop, it was easy for me to install Vista SP1 on one, bench it, pull the drive out, put another drive in, install Server 2008 and bench that. The numbers were virtually identical.

Not true. It doesn't affect it as much as emulating or such would, but there definitely is a performance hit As I already showed you, Wikipedia says differently. Microsoft also says differently. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa384219(VS.85).aspx WOW64 on the x64 architecture is not some hack made to get it to work via some emulated environment. When a 32-bit app is ran, Windows simply tell the CPU "This needs to run 32-bit, take care of that" and the CPU handles it. Being little more than an x86 processor with a 64-bit system grafted onto it, the CPU can do this natively without any fancy tricks.

Some forums I frequent restrict certain activities to users who have a certain post count. Like one won't allow signatures for people with less than 10 posts. This helps reduce certain types of forum spammers. Maybe this guy believes these sort of rules apply here.

You won't be running VM's and playing games at the same time, unless that game is Spider Solitaire.

The WOW64 mechnism is very light and doesn't impact performance. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP_editions The current slide in RAM prices has caused 8GB of RAM today to cost what 2GB cost a year ago. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820146731 I went with two packs of these in my new gaming rig. Vista x64 sees it, and Superfetch has often found enough stuff to cache to fill it. FILL 8GB. The other thing here is future-proofing. Not only because x64 is cool now, but because a year from now when a user wants to put in more RAM, they won't be looking at an OS reinstall and re-doing the machine. Besides, it won't be long before they'll be selling desktop boards that can support 16GB. http://www.intel.com/products/desktop/moth...SG-overview.htm ...see? TECHNOLOGY IS FAST.

I use server 2008 x64, much better than vista http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=2245 In my own testing Server 2008 has not shown to have any kind of workstation level advantage over Vista SP1. The way it is tweaked to be a server may allude to some magical performance gain, but that would only be recognized if you're doing activities that are more server-ish anyway like heavy file I/O or network activity. For typical workstation tasks the two are identical.

If it's still sluggish something is wrong. Could be one of those "right drivers." From your personal experience, please list off some games that you know for certain do not work in Vista. Specific titles please.

At this point, if a well-powered system is running slow with Vista, something is wrong with the system.

In the link you provide, there is neither any reference to 64-bit nor "defective" as a word, so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be looking at. It's a lot of code from an 18 month old article. The player, when running that video, uses about 46MB of RAM. It uses 64-bit codecs provided from the x64 components pack, a codec pack that's been posted on these very forums since it's creation. WMP11 64-bit can't use 32-bit codecs, WOW64 or otherwise.

I have been scouring Google and have not seen one single reference to Excel taking more CPU cycles to do calculations under a 64-bit OS. Can you provide me with some links? You want an H.264 video in an MKV container? You got it. Screenshot attached. Vista x64, WMP11 64-bit. "[Minori-Osu!] Zero no Tsukaima - Princess no Rondo - 01 (h264 848x480) [9EA0CE55].mkv" I have also been scouring Google for any references to unsatisfactory playback of HD content in Vista x64, but have been unable to find anything.

It's not fair to say this. Of course 64-bit code is going to take more RAM. The amount of extra RAM it takes is not twice as much or anywhere near it. I haven't experienced this personally. Excel's resource usage on my Vista x64 work PC has never been strikingly high. Again, unfair. You make it sound like 64-bit drivers have a monopoly on bugs. Oh believe me they don't. It doesn't take more than a casual glance at the "fixes" part of any nVidia 32-bit driver documentation to see that. Given the vast numbers of people out there now running 64-bit Vista, it can be safely deduced that 64-bit drivers have reached a satisfactory maturity level. I use Vista x64 at work in a production environment with a variety of hardware and peripherals and everything works and works well. I never complain. As for codecs, I typically use Windows Media Player 11 32-bit (since it is the default player in Vista x64, and XP64 does not have 64-bit WMP) and for the most part it works. 64-bit codecs are getting better all the time, but for the most part a 64-bit media player won't provide much benefit over a 32-bit one. Videos just aren't math-intensive enough. Codec writers aren't exactly bending over backwards to get their stuff up-ported, and I don't blame them. I'm not someone to do frequent reinstalls anyway, but with Windows requiring activation on every install it makes sense for me to install my OS as little as possible. The Vista Business x64 I installed two weeks ago on my new rig is the OS I intend to still be using a year or two or three from now. As such, I do not want to be forced to reinstall simply to run an app that is 64-bit only. I'm no future teller, but given how practically every mainstream processor sold today not only has x64 instructions but has multiple cores, the idea of a "64-bit only, multi-core only" killer app sometime in the next couple of years isn't too far-fetched. Microsoft *did* toy with the idea of a 64-bit Office during the Office 2007 development process. Vista x64 isn't some hobby development thing. It's mature, stable, and runs very well. It works as a gaming OS, it works as a production OS. oh, and.. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16820146731 Mushkin 4GB for $90 but with a rebate, $65. 8GB would be $130. I ended up getting this myself.

What are some games that this directly causes not to run in Vista?

... All of this has nothing to do with the original po$t. --- I have one obscure codec that won't work in WMP11 in Vista. My old screen capture software (the last freeware FRAPS) also doesn't seem to work in Vista.