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Windows Vista or XP?
brunooo
Member #8,346
February 2007
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Hello!

Christmas is coming, my computer is too old and slow for new games, I bought it 4 years ago :P, and I would like to buy a new one.
I searched a little and found that here in my country (Brazil), the good shops (big ones) only sell computers with windows vista. I would like to know if its a good idea to change to vista or stay at xp!

The computer I am aiming to buy has this features:

CPU 2.2GHz
RAM 2GB
HD 250GB
GPU 256MB

Thank you :)

Erikster
Member #9,510
February 2008
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Oh crap. What have you done?

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Roy Underthump
Member #10,398
November 2008
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AFAIK you can't get a legal copy of XP anymore. Microsoft wants you to stay on the upgrade treadmill.

[EDIT]
http://gizmodo.com/384368/dell-to-sell-xp-after-june-30-microsoft-to-pretend-theyre-selling-vista-to-save-face

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Thomas Harte
Member #33
April 2000
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I think Vista is a lot better than people let on. Why not accept the Vista you seem to inevitably be about to get, give it a decent shot and switch back if you don't like it? For games the DirectX 10 has to be a benefit?

TestSubject
Member #8,989
August 2007
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I haven't had...many...Vista specific problems. Well, I've had some driver...um...

Vista isn't that great. It isn't a bug ridden monstrosity, but it certainly has problems. I'm sending in my computer for the second time, this time for pixel artifacts and a noisy fan/harddrive. I'm not sure if the pixel artifacts are a software problem, but it had a ton of driver issues earlier.

Before these problems, it was hanging and etc constantly. The RAM got replaced, and that cleared up.

Sure, those problems all seem hardware related, but I'm pretty sure it is due to Vista/hardware incompatability. As more drivers are released for Vista and the bugs are worked out, it should be OK for a computer.

More on topic: it sucks RAM, so you might want to spring for a little more RAM or turn off...everything while playing a game.

Trent Gamblin
Member #261
April 2000
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I find Vista is just a little bit better than XP. Sure, everyone says it sucks but mostly those are people who would hate anything MS produced. It's more stable and has more features in MHO than XP. I've only seen a few bluescreens when I stupidly overclocked my cpu to try to get more FPS out of A5 :P. And in the whole time I was developing the D3D driver for A5, messing with stuff and making mistakes constantly, I couldn't get it to an unrecoverable state which I am impressed by.

brunooo
Member #8,346
February 2007
avatar

Erikster, what I have done? Nothing I guess...

Others, thanks for the replies! So, should I get more RAM? 4GB? I like to stay with a lot of softwares oppened at same time :)

Trent Gamblin
Member #261
April 2000
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2GB will be enough but more never hurts, if you can afford it.

MiquelFire
Member #3,110
January 2003
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More RAM is always better (until you hit 3GB on 32-bit, above that may be wasted RAM sadly)

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Thomas Fjellstrom
Member #476
June 2000
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I dunno, I get all my ram in 32bit linux with a "bigmem" kernel.

edit: I just upgraded to 4G :)

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LennyLen
Member #5,313
December 2004
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Quote:

Sure, those problems all seem hardware related, but I'm pretty sure it is due to Vista/hardware incompatability.

This really only seems to be a problem with older hardware. A new computer shouldn't have driver problems.

MiquelFire
Member #3,110
January 2003
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That's Linux. ;)

Unless 32-bit Vista has PAE support, I doubt it will see more than 3.25-3.75 GB of RAM (depends on hardware installed, I lucked out on my computer at work as I see 3.5GB)

---
Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.
MiquelFire.red
If anyone is of the opinion that there is no systemic racism in America, they're either blind, stupid, or racist too. ~Edgar Reynaldo

Peter Wang
Member #23
April 2000

Is MinGW still a PITA with Vista?

BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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Quote:

I would like to buy a new one.

I would recommend you build instead of buy personally, but that is just me.

Quote:

I would like to know if its a good idea to change to vista or stay at xp!

I was hesitant and didn't think I'd ever switch at first, mostly feeding off all the FUD people spread about it (people who seem to think it wastes memory or CPU or hard drive or whatever). Then XP ran like snot on my new system, mostly due to shitty drivers, so I took the plunge and haven't looked back.

Quote:

AFAIK you can't get a legal copy of XP anymore. Microsoft wants you to stay on the upgrade treadmill.

You can still get legal copies of it unless they've changed that in the last 2 weeks.

Quote:

Vista isn't that great. It isn't a bug ridden monstrosity, but it certainly has problems. I'm sending in my computer for the second time, this time for pixel artifacts and a noisy fan/harddrive. I'm not sure if the pixel artifacts are a software problem, but it had a ton of driver issues earlier.

Before these problems, it was hanging and etc constantly. The RAM got replaced, and that cleared up.

Sure, those problems all seem hardware related, but I'm pretty sure it is due to Vista/hardware incompatability. As more drivers are released for Vista and the bugs are worked out, it should be OK for a computer.

More on topic: it sucks RAM, so you might want to spring for a little more RAM or turn off...everything while playing a game.

You're another one of those, dare I say it, vistaphobes that blame all your problems on Vista. I'm throwing you in the same category as my grandmother who hates Vista because it automatically downloads updates. Noisy fans, hard drives, pixel issues, etc all sound like hardware issues. Bad RAM is in no way caused by Vista, it is a hardware problems. Sounds like you bought a huge piece of shit computer, and that is your problem, not Vista.

It doesn't suck up much more RAM than XP, and if you're that concerned then disable Aero and the fancy effects. Most of the used RAM is for disk caching, which it actually does well (as opposed to XP, which was awful). If I shut down my computer and take 3 gig of my RAM out, my memory usage will drop. I will lose about 3GB of disk caching, but Vista will be using less. If you want to be one of those idiots who goes on Digg and brags because their Vista uses 200MB of ram, you can always disable superfetch and family, but then you're just stuck with wasted (empty) ram and low memory usage.

Quote:

Others, thanks for the replies! So, should I get more RAM? 4GB? I like to stay with a lot of softwares oppened at same time

I have 4GB in my box now, which stupidly is 4 1 gig sticks. Someday I'll spend another $100 to buy 8GB of ram to toss in, and sell the 4 gigs I have now to a friend. But yeah, I wouldn't bother with more than 2GB unless you're going to install a 64-bit copy. I'm running 64-bit copy just fine, and you'll be fine as long as you don't have any hardware older than a few years or so.

Quote:

Is MinGW still a PITA with Vista?

I don't even know at this point, but in all honesty I'd skip MinGW completely. It's so outdated and nobody seems to care to get it up to date. I personally would grab Visual Studio Express to use over it, but if you're obsessed with C99 or something similar it may not be for you.

Trent Gamblin
Member #261
April 2000
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Quote:

Is MinGW still a PITA with Vista?

Not with gcc 4.*. With gcc 3.4.5, the latest "current release", you still have to add a directory to your path.

TestSubject
Member #8,989
August 2007
avatar

Damn, I was honestly trying to be pro-Vista. I have had a shitton of problems on my computer, but none of them have really seemed like they came from Vista itself.

My computer had more problems than I can count. (that's a lie, it's had about four serious problems and ten minor ones) It's going to get sent in again, and I expect it to break again when I get it back. I'm not blaming it on Vista, I'm blaming it on nVidia and HP.

I hate sending in my computer so much. This laptop constantly sounds like it's trying to save the internet to disk and it randomly freezes for a second and spews the characters I had been trying to type. I don't trust it to compile code, and the few internet games I play and irritatingly slow. If only my computer wasn't a PoS...

Peter Wang
Member #23
April 2000

Quote:

but if you're obsessed with C99 or something similar it may not be for you.

When you're using C as a portable assembly language to implement another language, some gcc extensions become really handy (and allow your output to go a lot faster). Of course, you shouldn't use them normally.

Quote:

Not with gcc 4.*. With gcc 3.4.5, the latest "current release", you still have to add a directory to your path.

Good to know.

SiegeLord
Member #7,827
October 2006
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C99 is not an extension :P If there is a latest standard, so why not use it? Plus, MSVC is not compliant to standards it is supposed to support anyway... If you are developing solely for Windows, by all means use it. If you want cross-platform code, I'd suggest ditching it.

Fixing MinGW 3.4.5 takes 30 seconds if you follow the plethora of tutorials online for it (there are two separate ones on Allegro wiki even). Haven't tried 4.1 yet... I don't like developing in Windows anyway.

Vista has been a mixed bag in my case. It's File Explorer is terrible, but the Uninstall Programs is great. The write protection on the Program Files makes many of my older games not run all that well. UAC isn't all fun either (disabling it is not an excuse, to stop all you Vista apologists). It's icon theme is bad too. In my mind the Uninstall Programs thing has been the best thing about it... compared to XP's it's awesome. I really like Vista's Uninstall Programs thing.

Unfortunately, due to the drivers situation, using XP now is no longer wise... you are pretty much stuck with Vista at this point. Either suck it up, or switch to Linux.

"For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow."-Ecclesiastes 1:18
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BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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But using GCC extensions are no more portable than MSVC extensions, the only difference being gcc works on more platforms.

UAC keeps idiots who shouldn't be using a computer a little safer, in theory. I naturally don't need it, so I disable it.

Peter Wang
Member #23
April 2000

(Note I never suggested C99 is a gcc extension.)

Quote:

Fixing MinGW 3.4.5 takes 30 seconds if you follow the plethora of tutorials online for it (there are two separate ones on Allegro wiki even).

I just had a look. One suggests putting mingw/bin on the PATH. I don't understand. That's standard practice even on non-Vista systems. If that's all there is to it, the problem I had (about a year ago, can't remember it exactly) must have been fixed.

Don Freeman
Member #5,110
October 2004
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I had a friend that, just yesterday, had their computer die because of Vista. He had the automatic updates on of course. I hate systems that think they know what they are doing and then screw things up more. The funny thing was that on rebooting the system, windows tried to roll back to a previous known good state...and that failed as well. Windows can't even get that right. I'm not totally against the big M, but I wish they would fix a LOT of crap...or at least open it up more so we could fix our computers. I guess there is always Linux. I uninstalled Vista on my laptop and installed my copy of XP pro on it. I did it a long time ago, but the manufacture just recently started providing XP drivers for the motherboard and chipsets. I got tired of my software (which some was made by Microsoft:o) not working with Vista.:-/ There are a lot of cool features in Vista...I guess it just needs some time to mature more.

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BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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For the most part, automatic updates should work fine. Sometimes there are problems though, and thats why people get paid to fix them. They do fix a lot, even though some is ignored or whatever. Not like Linux is much better, there is a ton of issues over there. Windows is fairly open, just not open source. And in all honesty, the people who will hack source to fix the problem are in the minority. Have fun on Linux, I'll stick with my OS that is commercially backed and pushed.

SiegeLord
Member #7,827
October 2006
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That's a lot hypocrisy and ignorance right there, BAF; it's dangerous to put so much of it in a single post. Spread it out more next time :P

"For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow."-Ecclesiastes 1:18
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BAF
Member #2,981
December 2002
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Damn, I'll try. In all reality though, Linux isn't really in any better situation, sure it's open source, but for their supposed target audience (average users), nobody gives a rats ass. They just want it to work, which Windows does more often than Linux, at least last time I tried it out.

Trent Gamblin
Member #261
April 2000
avatar

The vista/gcc thing may be fixed. If not all you have to do is add c:\mingw\libexec\gcc\mingw32\3.4.5\ or whatever directory cc1.exe is in to the path.

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