So today I vaped my gaming rigs XP partition and replaced it with Vista Ultimate 64bit Super Hyper Turbo Edition. I did this because DirectX 10 seems to be Vista-only, and because my gaming rig has 8GB of ram of which XP could address 3.75GB or so, which seems rather wasteful.
My experience with Vista is a bit more positive than my previous one, in which I installed Vista about an hour after it came out and used it for about another hour, before unistalling it and setting fire to the place as I departed.
It’s still hilariously clunky compared to OSX, both aesthetically and operationally. However this time it actually has drivers for common hardware! So, like, that’s nice. And common apps I might want to fire up while gaming work on it – the Steam client, for example, and all of the installers for my various Blizzard games. It still has the amazingly inconsistent and ugly graphical elements of the UI, though – they didn’t clean that up in SP1.
I did have to spend quite a bit of time beating the lolfail out of it with a stick. So no UAC, no nag popups, etc etc.
It was an interesting setup, and I know more than I did, but I don’t really care about tweaking it too finely, because I use this computer for gaming and thus the operating system is simply a much much more complicated version of one of those old text-based launcher menu systems you used to run on DOS so you could easily launch Doom or Warcraft I or possibly a terminal program for Hot BBS Action.
I guess it’s kinda moot about how suck this OS still looks/acts given that Microsoft are already releasing beta copies of Windows 7 which indicates that they’re just giving up on Vista as a brand so tainted with failure that it’s beyond rescue. And that is kinda funny, as Win7 is almost certainly going to turn out to be the same old core with some cosmetic changes. Basically it’ll be Vista with a stupid hat, false beard, and an absurdly fake accent.
“Nooo, senior! Ieee am not theees ‘Vesta’ of which you speak. My name is Don Incognito!”
As long as it can successfully launch whatever Windows-only games I wish to play, I don’t mind what they call it.
December 30, 2008 at 4:01 am
I’m kind of hoping that it’ll be like Vista, only this time it’ll be finished.
December 30, 2008 at 5:57 am
DirectX 10 is Vista-only? WTF?
I have a separate install for gaming, but it’s XP 64 bit. They will kill me before I install Vista on anything. Luckily I play only adventure games, most of which you can’t play on Vista even if you were insane enough to want to.