Which system? Your opinion please (or, Floppy installs Vista Blog)

[floppybootstomp]

Update time

I haven't done much to it this weekend, just this:

Installed Irfanview, great proggie but I was't too impressed with it's screen capture facilities so I thought I'd see if Grabbit 2, an eight year old piece of screen grab software, would work within Vista.

And blow me it did

Here's a grab I done with it:

Installed The Longest Journey original and Dreamfall: The Longest Journey. Both work fine.

Installed Picture Project V7.1 the software that came with my Nikon cameras, that works ok (although tbh it ain't the greatest software in the world).

Installed db Power Amp, an old piece of software that converts mp3 to wav, cda to wav/mp3 and vice versa; imports CD's to rip to WAV or mp3 supplying disc info and has an auxillary module for recording from line in. It worked and this was seriously good news cos I like this program

Discovered that although I can print to another printer on my network, Vista to XP, I cannot seem to print from another XP machine to the printer connected to the Vista machine. I wonder if there's a workaround here or it's simply that XP won't recognise Vista? That's likely, I think.

Discovered that if you transfer a file from an XP machine to my Vista machine over the network, I have to enter a user name and password, despite enabling sharing on all drives and Documents on Vista. And also that you can only send files to a folder named 'Public' within Vista.

Not sure whether I like that or not.

And now another major upset.

Call Of Duty 2 Multiplayer will not work

CoD2 is one of my major time wasters so I am a bit cheesed off about this one.

Straight off on insertion of the DVD Vista told me there was a compatibility issue and to install the Adobe Macromedia Flash Player before installation. So I did, although not 100% happy with that.

Applied patch, set up all the options, max graphics and all.

Single player looks and works great.

With multiplayer, it works from the desktop link but won't connect to the main server. Within the game it won't switch from single to multiplayer, I'm given an error window saying there's an 'elevation problem'. I disabled the firewall block, I made compatibility to XP SP2 and I made the game have Admin privileges. But still Zilch.

Not entirely the end of the world cos I can play CoD2 on the machine in the bedroom but I really did like playing it on this machine with this graphics card and this monitor.

What chance CoD 1 working?

Only other games I will be trying on this machine now are Bioshock (maybe); STALKER Chernobyl; Syberia (maybe) and I will probably buy Halo 2 although the cheapest I can find it is £25.00 atm, I may wait until it comes down in price. And I have Timeshift on the way.

And just by way of mentioning I installed NFS Porsche 2000 on my AMD/XP machine today, it works fine and I had lots of fun playing that. TOCA Race Driver 3 on that machine as well.

What we need is more great games that work in Vista.

So, that's it for now, Sir Flops signing off

 

[muckshifter]

Great work Sir Floppy.


... err, you do know about Vista's own snippet tool.

There are several capture options:

• [font=verdana,geneva]Free-form Snip: draw an irregular line, such as a circle or a triangle, around an object.[/font]
• [font=verdana,geneva]Rectangular Snip: draw a precise line by dragging the cursor around an object to form a rectangle.[/font]
• [font=verdana,geneva]Window Snip: select a window, such as a browser window or dialog box, that you want to capture.[/font]
• [font=verdana,geneva]Full-screen Snip: capture the entire screen when you select this type of snip.[/font]

[font=verdana,geneva]After you capture a snip, it's automatically copied to the mark-up window, where you can highlight, annotate, save or share the snip.[/font]


Just thought I would point it out to you ...

 

[floppybootstomp]

Brief notes on latest messin' about:

Uninstalled CoD2

Installed STALKER Shadow Of Chernobyl and patched it. Working fine.

Installed Far Cry, patched it. Wouldn't work. Within properties (accessed from game shortcut) changed compatibility to XP SP2 and enabled Admin privileges. Game worked. Looks gorgeous at full res and works well.

Installed Bioshock. Bioshock is one of the few games that uses DX10. After install it auto-updated all by itself, downloaded and installed patch. Started game, went through activation process (this is the fifth time I've done this now) all was good.

Bioshock looks and plays absolutely superb, definitely better than it did in XP. This is possibly the very first real advantage I've seen using Vista so far, the first one that's given me a huge smile, anyways. Hopefully, a sign of things to come, we shall see.

My primary disk, drive C, are 2 WD 74Gb Raptors, totalling about 140Gb. I now only have 31Gb left.

On that I hope to install:

Timeshift

Halo 2

MYOB (Mind Your Own Business business accounting software).

Nero 8 OEM

And possibly:

Crap Cleaner

Real Player Alternative

Riva Tuner

WS_FTP Pro V9.01

And that will be about it, actually.

My Canon camera software wouldn't work, (I don't actually own any Canon Cameras any more but I do like some of their software) in particular I will miss Photostitch, I used that software a fair bit. Fortunately I can use it on another machine but if I only had one machine with Vista on, I'd be stuffed.

I'm not going to bother with AdAwareSE, it now seems toothless to me. I may load Spybot S & D, haven't made my mind up yet.

I will probably uninstall Nikon's Picture Project, Vista has inbuilt stuff that surpasses it.

And that, for now, is about it.

I'm a little disappointed about some games not working and the issues with my sound card but other than that, not too bad.

I will come back and report on how the remaining stuff i want to use/install shapes up and then I will probably make a final post summarising.

In the meantime, it seems I have a helluva lot to discover if Mucks' pointer to the inbuilt screen capture facility is anything to go by.

As ever, I know it's a cliche, but - RTFM

There's always stuff there you just don't know is there and it's been that way since Win 3.1 or, for that matter, Red Hat V1.0.

Laters, folks.

 

[Electronics & Photo Fan]

Sorry to butt in this thread flops, but:

Oh, and a PS: Toca Race Driver 3 doesn't work in Vista. I know this cos I Googled

If you really like this game (as I do) you can get it to work in Vista. The part that isn't compatible with Vista is the

"StarForce protection drivers"

(They are an anti-piracy tool, used by the game developers to check the disc is genuine, and if it isn't, the game will engineer the DVD drive to operate in such a manner it will end up destroying the data on the disc. This is, apparently, acheived by returning read errors and getting the drive to attempt to read the disc at slower speed with increasing laser power, which over the long term will degrade the disc. This is all Internet news, none of it is confirmed by StarForce but it's a given really) You may know this already.

A quick download from StarForce, installation, then TOCARD3 will work ok. (I beleive it is this link, it's been a year since I installed it)

Anyway, thought I'd post it just in case you like RD3 a lot.

 

[amanda223]

Well buddy if you want to built a gaming computer then this one is best ...


Dual-core Technology
3.20Ghz clock speed (AM2 Socket)
2x1MB L2 Cache
2000 fsb

 

[floppybootstomp]

E&PF: Thanks for the tip about those drivers, but I've already installed TOCA Race Driver Three on my machine # 2 where it's working fine.

Right then, nearly finished.

Timeshift hasn't arrived from Play.Com yet and Nero 8 OEM hasn't been shipped from Scan yet, they promised a replacement last Friday. And talking of Scan this is a little off topic but they stiill haven't refunded me for an rma I first reported mid-December 2007 despite it being 'aproved' as faulty and a refund being granted. Scan are definitely on my crap list, that's for sure.

I shopped for Halo 2 and it seemed expensive just about everywhere. Looked in my local GameStation shop and they had a used copy for twenty pounds so I bought it. Have played first level, so far it's seeming identical to Halo 1 but with slightly different graphics. Nevertheless, enjoying this game

Have now put all game launch icons into the quick launch menu, this gives me an uncluttered desktop and, er, well - a quick launch All that remains on my desktop is the recycle bin icon, sans text thanks to Mucks' tip

Have now installed, and all is working:

Halo 2
RS Electronic Catalogue
Riva Tuner
Crap Cleaner
WS_FTP V9.01
Spybot Search & Destroy
BOINC

So that just leaves for me to install:

MYOB (Mind Your Own Business) Accounting software.
Nero OEM 8
Timeshift.

That will probably almost fill up my hard disk, I may have to uninstall one game, not sure yet, here's how my hard disks are looking, I'd rather run all apps & games from drive C and keep drive D just for storage. But space is getting a little tight.

 

[murdoch]

Why are your hard drives called Shinny Beast & George?

 

[floppybootstomp]

Why are your hard drives called Shiny Beast & George?

Why is the sky blue?

Why am I right handed?

Why don't I like whelks?



Shiny Beast << Link

I thought it was a good name for a computer and/or a hard disk.

As for George, dunno really, it's a very English name isn't it? And also a name that would suggest a good temperament, well to me it does.

Next

 

[muckshifter]

Why are your hard drives called Shinny Beast & George?

If you have 5 PC on a network, finding the right Drive C:\ may be a little confusing ... and, because one can rename a drive and call it Fred, George, The Kitchen Sink ... anything but Sue.

 

[crazylegs]

Still enjoying reading this Blog er thread...

 

[Abarbarian]

Why is the sky blue?

Why am I right handed?

Why don't I like whelks?



Shiny Beast << Link

I thought it was a good name for a computer and/or a hard disk.

As for George, dunno really, it's a very English name isn't it? And also a name that would suggest a good temperament, well to me it does.

Next

An I thought it was to do with George and the Dragon .

 

[floppybootstomp]

Ok, just about done now. Installed the game 'Timeshift' just now, patched it to V1.2 and tried it, works fine.

That leaves me just 16.5Gb left on my primary drive (out of 232Gb, 2 x 74Gb Raptors) which is cutting it a bit fine, really, but I'll live with it.

Only things to install now are Nero 8 and MYOB business accounting software, which will probably take, at most, another half a Gig of space.

I phoned Scan today and they say Nero 8 was posted on Monday Second Class Post so I am a little worried about that, lucky it only cost £4.59. I'll give it another week and if it hasn't turned up I will phone Scan again. Talking about Scan I also enquired about my rma I mentioned in an earlier post and the guy I spoke to wondered why I hadn't had a refund and said he'd make sure I got that refund right away. Ho-hum, why do they drag their heels when they have to give money back? Have lost a little faith in Scan, gotta admit.

Odd to think this started off as a hardware thread, where I was wondering what system would be best for games after I'd bought a new AMD 3.2Ghz CPU. Then it turned into a software thread, specifically a Vista installation thread.

btw, Mucks added the '(or, Floppy installs Vista Blog)' to the thread title, not I, though I think it was a good idea.

All in all, I'm glad I've changed to Vista, I am enjoying it. As I said, lots of little things pleasing me, too numerous to either remember or list but I'm sure you know what I mean when you do something within an OS and it makes you smile, kinda cheers you up. I found Linux PCLOS to be a little like that as well, just by way of mentioning.

Biggest disappointment was CoD2 Multiplayer not working

Within the next few days I intend to write a summary, a precis if you will, of this thread and post it as a sticky in the Forum's Vista section.

Thanks, everybody, for reading this and for your comments, apreciated

 

[floppybootstomp]

I say you chaps Vista has just done something that has made me jolly cross

In fact you could say I'm downright ****ed off with Vista

I was just warming to it when my worst fears were justified, Microsft's nannying attitude and trying to tell me what to run and what not to run

Microsoft frickin defender, in all it's wisdom, decided to stop BOINC running at startup

And because I've only just noticed it my computer has likely run for over 24 hours, including overnight, crunching nothing. Zilch. Bugger-all. A complete waste of electric thanks to Bill Soddin' Gates

This is what makes Linux such an attractive alternative - freedom of choice.

So now I have to manually start BOINC every time I reboot or fresh boot. I've tried and tried to add it to the startup, including creating a short cut and placing it in the startup folder - still MS Defender blocks it

Yes, I've read the manual, no, I can't figure it out. Never had this problem with XP.

So there you go, the first thing that's really made me angry about Vista.

And while I'm being critical, take a look at This article

Makes you wonder what else is set by default.

Well actually, you can tell, just press Win + r and you can see for yourself.

I have now disabled pre-fetch.

/rant

 

[Taffycat]

There there Sir flops, fear not, there is a very easy way around this, just download a wee application called "Startup Unblocker" and it will run BOINC and anything else you want to run at startup without the nanny-hassle. Here it is.

Others - including me - had the same problem, but this little application works a treat

 

[muckshifter]

So now I have to manually start BOINC every time I reboot or fresh boot. I've tried and tried to add it to the startup, including creating a short cut and placing it in the startup folder - still MS Defender blocks it.

And rightly so too ... how dare a program run without the right security credentials.


If you really wanna shout, shout at Boinc for NOT being Vista aware/compatible ... I have nearly given up on this Boinc crap software on several occasions ... everyone here running Vista & Boinc have had the same "problem" as you ... read the forums.

This is what makes Linux such an attractive alternative - freedom of choice.

err, and what 'choice' is that exactly? Why ain't you then just using Linux on all your systems with all that 'freedom' I'm sure you could do without MS.

And while I'm being critical, take a look at this article ...

SuperFetch does more than caching. Windows Vista runs a SuperFetch service that analyzes your application behavior and usage patterns, meaning that it tracks which applications you request the most. A good example would be your activity as you start the PC in the morning: You launch Outlook to fetch email, a messenger, a web browser and probably additional applications such as a development environment. If you do this repeatedly and ideally in the same order, SuperFetch will recognize this and then proactively populate these applications into all available main memory the next time you start the PC. You should only wait for a few minutes before you commence work to give the SuperFetch service the time to "superfetch" your applications.
The result is simple and impressive: As you return from your coffee run and launch your applications, they are available much quicker, as they already populate your main memory. Similar to conventional Windows caching, SuperFetch will not touch its cached data unless there is an application that requires main memory space. Windows will not prioritize the SuperFetch feature over memory requests by applications, as this would cause the memory management to swap data onto the swap file, which of course would slow down the whole system considerably.

Simply spoke, SuperFetch tries to relocate application data from the slow hard drive into all available memory. It utilizes the available capacity to create a so-called warm memory state for the single purpose of making applications available almost instantaneously. However, SuperFetch needs a certain amount of main memory. At only 512 MB RAM size, the feature won't be very efficient, as Windows plus 2-3 applications will already eat up the total memory capacity. There won't be main memory space left to pre-cache application data. If you don't work with multiple applications at a time, 1 GB should be enough to see a positive impact of SuperFetch when compared to Windows XP. However, we experienced the best results at a main memory capacity of 2 GB - more won't hurt either.

I have more ...

... these features tell you that Vista works a lot better when you throw more RAM at it, and Tom's recommends at least 2GB if you're going to take advantage of the caching benefits of SuperFetch

... wanna read some more?

Hey, I here Win98 is the perfect gaming platform ... shame it ain't got a bloody clue what your hardware is.

The point is, you have hardware that needs a modern OS to make full use of it ... Why do I 'need' spare ram, I don't, I want ALL my ram being used.

I dunno, if people can't 'see' the technical benefits, it must be an MS plot, but actually, they ain't hiding, people just don't read the right words, they pick up on the negatives and skip any positives 'cos it's MS.


my rant over, I'm out of here.

 

[floppybootstomp]

So now I have to manually start BOINC every time I reboot or fresh boot. I've tried and tried to add it to the startup, including creating a short cut and placing it in the startup folder - still MS Defender blocks it.

And rightly so too ... how dare a program run without the right security credentials.

I did read the explanation at the site taffycat gave me a link to and I must confess it does make more sense now I've had an explanation.

But there are many arguments to this whole issue, not least the stupidity of the average user, the maliciousness of idiots writing malware and viruses, resulting in MS's somewhat over protective stance with it's latest OS.

If you really wanna shout, shout at Boinc for NOT being Vista aware/compatible ... I have nearly given up on this Boinc crap software on several occasions ... everyone here running Vista & Boinc have had the same "problem" as you ... read the forums.

I did search the forums as I recalled reading about this problem but at least ten searches found me.... nothing. So I posted. I knew if I created a big emough tantrum some kind soul would help me

As for BOINC being 'crap' it's WCG's software of choice I understand, so we're lumbered with it. After 8 or 9 years of continuous crunching I was, as I've mentioned before, considering retiring from crunching.

This may just be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

This is what makes Linux such an attractive alternative - freedom of choice.

err, and what 'choice' is that exactly? Why ain't you then just using Linux on all your systems with all that 'freedom' I'm sure you could do without MS.

That, sir, was below the belt

I've posted here many times on why I won't exclusively run Linux but I'll mention it again:

1) Games

2) User friendliness.

If Linux overcame those two hurdles tomorrow I'd ditch Windows forever.

But this is a commercial world and games developers are driven by profit and Linux developers seem to want to keep their nerdy status and exclusivity by making kernel building and console commands as hard to understand as ever.

Shot by both sides with human foibles.

As for pre-fetching, again it smacks of MS trying to do everything for you and using large chunks of memory to do that thing. I'm torn here between wondering whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. It smacks of Big Brother and memory hogging yet if it really does make things run faster, well, I'm not sure.

Since I've disabled pre-fetching I have noticed not a blind bit of difference in speed

A flippant comment about Win 98 Mr Mucks

Of course it's not an ideal gaming system, so far, to my mind, XP has that crown, or maybe even an Apple Mac

I dunno, if people can't 'see' the technical benefits, it must be an MS plot, but actually, they ain't hiding, people just don't read the right words, they pick up on the negatives and skip any positives 'cos it's MS.

I do know exactly what you mean by that and it cheeses me off a great deal as well. As I mentioned earlier there are many arguments to this whole debate and those who refuse to see, fairly, both sides of the coin are bigoted, narrow minded and perhaps a tad foolish.

Windows, for good or bad, is the OS most of will use, partly by choice but mostly cos that's just the way it is, we have to get by day by day with our computing needs and pleasures and for the majority of us Windows is the only viable option.

I will not come out blindly against Windows, I do actually enjoy using it and I know and recognise a lot of good things within Windows.

It can seem very rebellious/hip/trendy/whatever (insert your own word here) to knock Windows, to sneer, to act pro Linux all the time and feel superior but that equation works vice versa too, there are those who would hold Windows up to be the Holy Grail. Well, it ain't.

But neither is it all bad.

You know, what really sours the Windows experience, what tarnishes the whole Redmond raison d'etre is Microsoft's shameful business practices, their avaricious would-be monopoly on the world's computer users and their underhanded dirty tactics to crush any opposition or rivalry.

Just take a look at their past court appearances and the bankrupt software companies they've left in their wake.

And that is not sour grapes on my part, nothing wrong with capitalism or making lots of money, this is the Western Hemisphere and that's how we do things here.

It's just knowing that MS could sell Vista Ultimate to Home Users for less than half the price it's going for now, same with Office, and they'd still all be stinking rich.

My eyes are not closed to both sides of the argument, I like to think I see all sides.

But what I will do is comment on what I see, what I experience, what I think and how MS Vista affects me - both good and bad.

And that, Squire, is my rant over

PS: Taffycat - thanks for the link, it worked but now I get a full window for BOINC each time I start - one thing to another eh?

 

[itsme]

Flopps thank you, you have convinced me NOT to use Vista I have been a bit concerned about all the hassle it causes so I ain`t going to install..... I will stick with XP

 

[Taffycat]

Originally Posted by floppybootstomp
PS: Taffycat - thanks for the link, it worked but now I get a full window for BOINC each time I start - one thing to another eh?

It doesn't do that on mine Flops, not even when I first installed the Startup application, it just sits in the system tray (notification area) at startup. If I open it for any reason, it opens in a small window (which I drag to enlarge if I want to see everything.)

Um... it couldn't just be down to a setting in BOINC "view" I suppose? ... Probably not, but just thought I'd mention that the full window isn't mandatory. I'm sure you'll discover the reason

 

[nivrip]

it just sits in the system tray (notification area) at startup. If I open it for any reason, it opens in a small window (which I drag to enlarge if I want to see everything.)

Mine sits in the system tray too but when I click on the icon it opens to Full Screen. I certainly didn't configure it, it just did this from the very beginning.

 

[floppybootstomp]

Flopps thank you, you have convinced me NOT to use Vista I have been a bit concerned about all the hassle it causes so I ain`t going to install..... I will stick with XP

Well, despite the (relatively few) problems I've had with Vista I'm still pleased I changed, I'm enjoying it.

I wouldn't like to think I've been instrumental in putting you off, I've just told it like it happened to me, is all.

I dithered for a good three months before I went ahead and changed. I think a lot of the initial problems Vista users encountered have been overcome now.

If you are a Windows user, sooner or later I would imagine you'll have to change to Vista, that's how it was with 98/ME/2K/XP. Aria are selling Windows Premium Home Edition OEM for £60.00 right now, which is a very fair price imo.

Still, your choice sah

Taffycat:

Thanks for posting but yes, I'm aware of all that, I'm running BOINC on 4 machines and have been doing so for a fair while now.

I think my problem was caused because I accidentally removed BOINC from the start up list; then created a short cut to the BOINC manager and put that in the startup list; applied that fix you gave me a link to and now the manager window opens up on boot.

Not a biggie, I'll probably remove BOINC from the startup list then uninstall/reinstall BOINC when both WU's running are still in their early stages so I don't miss much crunching time.

I am still musing whether to quit crunching though, if it hadn't been for the recent introduction of a Cancer program for WCG, I would have quit.

I'm currently crunching just AIDS & Cancer WU's.

Again, thank you