Poll: yay ive got my first new computer in 7 years BUT WAIT!!!!

[tahrey]

I'm confused... you drop what must have been quite a considerable amount of money on a gaming computer (my entire "replace my 6-year-old laptop" budget next year will probably be the same amount as it would cost to buy a high-end graphics card; at best, the card, the PSU to run it, and maybe half the additional electricity it would then consume in the first year)... but don't check what OS, etc, it's going to be supplied with?

Back to the store, complain that they've sold you a pup with an outdated operating system, have them either take it back and refund you, or install 7 on it (free, or at minimal cost, depending just how much you spent in the first place).

I wouldn't accept that shit on a netbook these days. Either a lightweight everyday-tasks machine with XP (a la my 2006-vintage laptop), or a proper giant killer with 7 on it. Skip that aborted, pointless generation in between.
(Went straight from 98SE to XP, felt no pain... was always being called over to my uncle's place to fix his horrid WinME box though. And though I'd probably have been happy with Win2k, at least for a while, these days your equivalent would be either Server 200x, or Linux... Hmm, no thanks)

You might also want to look into what else they might have ripped you off with at the same time. Has it got an 80Gb 5400rpm IDE hard disk? Low-speed RAM? CDRW/DVDROM optical drive? Tube monitor? Copy of Works 2003 (or an illegally charged-for copy of OpenOffice) when you could probably have found some way to swing an educational edition of MSOffice 2007/2010? (OK, my examples are maybe a bit faecetious, but the sentiment is genuine...)

By the way, dude: Punctuations. Lernz dem. Even if you were intentionally meaning to convey a feeling of being overexcited and terribly breathless.

 

[godofallu]

Protip, any PC that can run Vista can run Windows 7.

Pay 25 bucks and upgrade!

 

[tahrey]

Aero in both Vista and Win7 takes system memory and GFX memory to run in the background, so out of the box will automatically have a 10% performance penalty compared to XP on the exact same hardware, all other things being equal.

But a huge drop in CPU use when moving windows, due to a combination of VSYNC stopping all available power being used to redraw the window and using the graphics card to render windows instead of CPU blitting.

Vista/7 also have a number of behind-the-scenes optimisations that allow for a more stable framerate.

Is this for real? Wasn't the idea of the introduction of Windows Accelerator graphics cards (in the early 90s fer pete's sakes) to avoid all that crap? Is the CPU actually very much involved in the drawing process, or does it just become unavailable for a period due to bus contention (which will likely appear as CPU usage on the system monitor)?

And is it even that relevant? Moving windows around is a pretty small fraction of anyone's everyday experience, and...
*opens task manager, switches to CPU pane*
*grabs a couple windows and throws them around violently with the mouse*
...there. One of those was Firefox, the other my old W98-compatibility-mode copy of Cool Edit 96. No noticable stuttering or slowdown or anything there and they moved quick enough even though "show contents whilst dragging", Cleartype, etc are all turned on and I haven't yet dropped back to the standard theme vs the blebby XP one (my work PC was recently re-imaged). CPU use, on a 2.1Ghz Core 2 Duo, with two monitors, cruddy integrated graphics and massively outdated drivers, was 50% of one core for the duration of shaking. Even the desktop icons redrew fairly well. This matches with my home Pentium-M 1.7 and even cruddier integrated graphics suffering only very minor slowdown when doing a similar test. CPU probably maxed - but only for a fraction of a second, every few minutes, in normal use.
Oh yeah, and as it's integrated, it'll be sharing system memory too. Further blurring the line between the CPU doing all the heavy lifting of data, and it merely chucking instructions at the GPU, because they're fighting over RAM access.

Modern CPU, good GPU, proper drivers, it'll make sod-all difference I'd bet. Less than 10% of the total processing power will be wasted. OR, if the bus IS getting tied up even so, it could be just as bad as on this one - because a CPU sitting on busy-wait for a few microsecs is still a CPU on busy-wait for that period regardless of the frequency or number of cores. It will at least manage to get more done in-between the hangups though.

Remember that XP was designed to run in a vaguely usable fashion with a 233mhz Pentium-MMX, double-digit megs of RAM, and something as simplistic as a non-accelerated standard VGA card (or a high rez, high colour card with much less onboard memory - or none at all, if it's AGP - and much less effective acceleration... in the meantime, monitor resolution hasn't increased by all that much). In other words, something 10x worse in all real measures than even my decrepit lappy. And if you go for the Standard theme, it's effectively the same display engine (with some very minor tweaks) as Windows95, which claimed to be usable on a 386DX with 4mb, and was certainly perfectly slick with 4x that power. Even if it is very inefficient for that kind of activity, will it really trouble a modern PC, which makes those old minima look like early 80s 8-bits would be compared to them?

On the other hand, even if it munches up a certain amount of RAM and other resources (preview bitmaps of the virtual desktops / each window, the window "chrome" (aka flair) itself, icons & other UI graphics and routines), it's still not going to be a great deal compared the multiple gigabytes of RAM and GB/sec of bus bandwidth a typical gamer PC now has (your desktop may require... what... 4mb as a full rez bitmap?), and there's no reason that a background app of any kind, whilst idle, will be sitting there chowing up 10% of the CPU or GPU time. An actual application should run at about the same speed, so long as the slightly reduced amount of available memory doesn't force it to use the swapfile.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

I haven't personally tried Vista because of all the friends that recommended me to stay away from it.I even had a friend who was using Vista for a couple of months and he couldn't play certain games,even old ones because of it's stupid incompatibility.

And then he changed to windows 7 and everything worked perfectly as if he were on a "upgraded XP".

 

[xXGeckoXx]

ok so ive had the same computer for the last 7 years and during that time it has crashed a total of 3 times and was actualy useable for gameing about 0 times but now i have a shiny new computer with 2gbs of dedicated graphics for all the shiny new age games and has a case that will put most alienware computers to shame but there is one small problem stopping me from playing my favourite classic on a graphics level higher then -3 or just sitting up and buying the newest game without studying it.
The name of the simple fat unmovable cow is *gasp* windows vista thats right let me allow the fact that a computer that is little more then a 4 days old has vista.


ok you done well the thing that i dont get about vista is why the hate i mean yeah it is a bit stranger then what the norm is but it seems to run fine and hasn't shown any hatred for anything
that isnt a game i mean my god how many games are exclusivly XP and 7 it just pisses me off to no end for example what is proberbly my favourite game ever (oblivion) is unable to work on this becouse oh look its XP only.
so yeah why all the hate to vista and why all the hate from vista to my games.

Bought a comp from a friends and it had vista ultimate. I have no problems with it and I DON'T FIX WHAT AIN'T BROKE.

 

[nexekho]

Is the CPU actually very much involved in the drawing process

Yes, on Aero Basic and pre-Vista.

because a CPU sitting on busy-wait for a few microsecs is still a CPU on busy-wait for that period regardless of the frequency or number of cores

Aero uses VSYNC to syncronise rendering with the display, meaning it doesn't horizontally tear. VSYNC on Vista/7 is not implemented via a busy wait as far as I can tell, seems to sleep until the buffer flips, with absolutely minimal CPU usage (<1%) with simple VSYNC'd scenes though it was on XP from my experience.

Remember that XP was designed to run in a vaguely usable fashion with a 233mhz Pentium-MMX, double-digit megs of RAM,

or a high rez, high colour card with much less onboard memory - or none at all, if it's AGP - and much less effective acceleration... in the meantime, monitor resolution hasn't increased by all that much

Most screens back then were roughly 1024x768, the norm is now 1900x1080. That's a lot more pixels to push and a lot more scope for tearing. (IIRC the VGA spec has a set scanline rate with a variable vblank period) Graphics cards are designed for pushing pixels, they're massively parallel reprogrammable rasterisation engines designed for doing simple, repetetive tasks. My 450GTS has 192 cores. 192! CPUs such as the x86 are typically instead geared for doing more complicated tasks on a smaller scale. Can you honestly say you see a framerate drop even in windowed mode under Aero compared to Basic?

 

[CommanderKirov]

Get XP... It's better than vista.

 

[Adam Blockus]

Vista is fine, there has been enough updates to make (almost) everything work fine. compatibility has never given me a problem and its not that resource intensive for your computer. There is nothing wrong with Vista, its just people saying it is because it had a less then stellar launch and not bothering to form their own opinion. NOW ALL THAT BEING SAID delete the Dashboard thing, its pretty useless.