ssgatbliss

I've got a Logitec G5 mouse and the Razer Tarantula keyboard. The mouse is great! You can control the "speed" of the mouse on the fly to three different settings, say slow for sniping, medium for normal, and high for control of tanks turrents (BF2142) and air defense guns. I like the keyboard because the keys are more like laptop keys so you have a shorter keystroke. Do they make you better? The mouse I would say yes due to the speed changes for accuracy, the keyboard not so much if any (but it does look great!). It's just a matter of practice and ensuring your ping rate isn't too high. I usually won't connect to anything 100 or higher. I usually choose servers that are mid 80's to low 90's, that's the best I can get. Once you get into the 100's or higher you notice you'll start dying more often. Issue with the keyboard. The tarantula keyboard won't let me boot into my bios so I have to switch to another keyboard if I want to do any overclocking or change memory settings etc. It also uses two USB ports (It has two more located on the keyboard).

I would have to agree with the majority, stick with XP. I had Vista installed and I really did like it but I also use that box for playing games and there were just too many issues with performance. (specifically Doom3 but all games ran a bit slower (BF2142, Half Life 2, EQ2 seems to be the only game that ran just as good if not better). I re-installed XP about two weeks ago and I'm stuck because I really liked the way Vista performed and looked so I want to put it back on but I need to play my games for stress relief. Overall if you play games stick with XP, also the drivers for my X-fi card on Vista blew big time. No microphone support and the card sounded like crap. Now that XP is back on my Polk Audios sound like themselves and not a pair of audivox specials from the flee market. Once driver support gets up to speed and games come out that are made for Vista I'll switch back. System: Opteron 185 OCd to 3.05, 2GB Corsair XLL, RAID 0, ATI X1950 pro, X-FI Pro sound card.

Don't know if this helps but my ASUS board had two different SATA controllers on it. One VIA and one PROMISE. I made the mistake once of trying to use the Promise drivers for the VIA. The PROMISE Sata chipset never did work correctly, I disabled it in the bios and stuck with the VIA drivers.

I hear you, as a matter of fact I just switched back to XP a day ago. Doom 3 runs horrible, Halflife 2 is OK but has a large performance hit, EQ2 seems to run very well speed wise but it constantly crashes, even BF2142 is crashing on me at least once or twice an hour. Even some of Microsofts own programs don't work well. I have MSN for my DSL and many times the mail portion crashes upon startup or locks up in the middle of an e-mail. Flight Simulator X has issues where it was working fine then all of a sudden I'm getting Data Execution Protection errors? Microsofts highly technical troubleshooting staff told me to add it to the exempt list but guess what? Flight Sim X won't let add it so it remains a problem. For general everyday web surfing and e-mail using Outlook 2007 Vista is OK but I went back to XP until they issue SP1 or fix performance issues. System is an Opteron 185 OCd to 3.05 Ghz with watercooling. 2GB mem, raid 0, X1950 Pro GPU, X-fi Plat sound card. And I liked the look and feel of Vista but I can't justify keeping it installed with all the issues I'm having.

OK, I have an AMD Opteron 185 (2.6Mhz) overclocked to 3.15 with watercooling, it goes to 2.99 stable with air and stock voltage. Running 2GB Corsair mem, ATI X1950 pro, Sata 1 RAID 0. It's funny because it gives me the same scores no matter if I'm at stock or OCd. Score of 5.5 with the proc being the slowest. 5.9 on RAID and GPU. This is off and old Asus AV8 AGP with X1950 AGP. Memory is 3200, 184 pin DDR 400 running at 333 becuase all memslots on MB are filled.

Yeah, I read much info like that and i have to confirm it, BUT it does not apply to tweaked Vista only to default Vista setup without vLite or disabled services. I have tried a few vista editions from Starter to Ultimate and they are all resource hug from about 300 to 600 MB RAM, not to mention CPU lagging even without Aero. As for me I have 1,5 GHz and 1 GB RAM and even Vista Ultimate with Aero and all effects ran smooth, but I have disabled that, because I hate those effects, which hurts my eyes and make me feel sick. I Agree. At work we have 2 machines with almost the same specs. They run, but to slow to really be productive on them. Back to ye good old XP for those 2. I also disabled the effects on most machines: people are complaining about headaches and feeling sick. If the machine you install Vista on is below the minimum specs (minimum being the operative word here) why would you install the OS onto that machine? I've seen a great many people on MSFN complaining about Vista but installing it on old components with minumum memory. It's the same as putting regular fuel in a vehicle that requires premium fuel. Sure the vehicle will run but you shouldn't complain when it starts backfiring and doesn't accelerate like it should.

Have you tried it? It's not nearly as bad as people are making it out to be. Most of those same people said the same exact things when XP was released.Really, the only thing you need to make sure of is that drivers are available for all of your hardware. There may be a few software compatibility issues as well...but it's not nearly as bad as some people make it sound. Core Duo's are 32-bit only. I would have to agree, the only issue I have with Vista is my microphone won't work until the drivers are updated on my X-Fi card. I have to say I really like Vista. I installed Ultimate on my PC and Home Premium on my daughters. The built in Parental controls and UAC are actually a good thing for her and the auto backup is nice too. Without buying extra software I can monitor what she is doing while setting time limits that she can access the computer. The UAC keeps her from downloading all those free screensavers and I have it set to back up all the info once a week. Could you set all this up under XP? Sure, but it's so much easier in Vista. Also the wireless setup (WPA2) and filesharing was point and click. I was able to get academic versions of the software so I didn't pay anywhere near what it goes for retail. I also added in Office 2007 and that is also much more user friendly. I've had no problems with games or dev software (EQ2, BF2142, Doom3, Halflife2, MATLAB, Visual Studio 2005). I really don't see what people are complaining about other than just to be heard. I saw a post before where someone said they had a high end system with a dual core 2.2Ghz processor and 2GB of memory. I hate to tell him that's not high end in today's market. Vista is today and you need todays hardware. If you want to run it on a min spec machine then expect minimum results. I'm running it on an older Asus AV8 AGP board with an AMD 185 Opteron OCd to 3.05 Ghz and 2GB of memory/RAID 0/ATI X1950 pro. My machine runs vista flawlessly and I get a rating of 5.5 out of 6 on the Vista performance index (memory is lowest score, it's older 3200 corsair memory running at 333 due to all slots being filled).