Is windows vist worth gtting for halo 2 ?

[Henry_1]

like it says in the tital is it worth getting vista for halo 2 i know my dad would say no but some people would say different but windows vista has bad revews but still i thuraly enjoyed the first halo and would really like the second even though it is not ment to be as good .

[WildCards]

Henry, stop being impatient and wait until christmas. I'm sure if your good, Santa might, just might be able to bring you something to play Halo 1, 2 & 3 on.

[chris watton]

Henry, whilst your PC I built you is absolutely perfect for any game/app you wish to throw at it; the parts in it are now a year or two old. You have a P4 3.2 CPU, single core, 2GB of DDR RAM, an ATI X800 GPU etc. These work great with XP, but if you install Vista, the PC components will not work as fast, especially when it comes to games. Oh yes, and your Creative Soundblaster card will not work properly too.

Plus, there are many, many very good games out there for your PC that are so much better than Halo2.

[Mr Whippy]

Is Halo 2 only Vista?

Just hope that Vista is scalable backwards wrt to all the bells and whistles, I like the idea of all the + points of Vista, but even XP is already a problem when you are trying to find network controls and so forth, in making it 'easier to use' it's got harder to find the really important bits.
I have everything looking as Win 95 as possible, yes as an OS it was a bit crap, but the UI complexity felt nice and linear. To get to manage HDD's without the My Computer icon in XP takes ages to find, it's user friendly for simple people but makes finding the right buttons for the jobs you might do once every 6 months impossible.

Even our work network guy took about 5 clicks to simply disable a connection. It also used about 1 gig of ram just to sit in windows. WHAT is using all that memory?

All just a bit silly imho. Stick with XP for as long as possible. Anyone making just Vista games will loose out alot imho for at least the next two years.

Dave

[chris watton]

Mr Whippy said:

Even our work network guy took about 5 clicks to simply disable a connection. It also used about 1 gig of ram just to sit in windows. WHAT is using all that memory?

All just a bit silly imho. Stick with XP for as long as possible. Anyone making just Vista games will loose out alot imho for at least the next two years.

Dave

I can confirm that, last night, I had all the 'bells and whistles' on for the Vista interface, and is was hogging no less that 1.2GB of RAM -for an OS that's just supposed to be in the background and unobtrusive!

(ATM, it's using 905MB, just with PH running! lol)

Edited by chris watton on Friday 31st August 12:00

[Noger]

Or "SuperFetch" as it is called

Vista grabs as much as it can from disk, that it thinks you might use, and holds it there in cache. Which is why it "hogs" all your memory. It isn't in fact hogging it, it is a good thing !

[jamieboy]

Vista is designed to use pretty much as much RAM as it can find. The stuff that isn't being used for active applications is used as cache.

edit - in fact, exactly what Noger just said.

Edited by jamieboy on Friday 31st August 12:06

[Ikemi]

This co-insides with your Xbox thread ... Buy a 360 for Halo 2 (and 3 when it is released!)

Don't touch Windows Vista with a barge pole! It's awful and incredibly slow!

[Henry_1]

yes i am being a bit impationt sorry lol

[Mr Whippy]

And I'm using 1.45gig now, running Outlook (44meg), Firefox(47meg), MSN messenger(28meg), 3DS Max(511meg), Maxwell renderer(403meg), Adobe Fireworks(106meg) and Media player(22meg)... along with lots of other little apps...

Considering I use my home PC to the same extent (more workstation) I doubt I'll move to Vista until 2gig ram sticks are cheap enough to make an 8 gig machine viable, because using all that memory to just run the OS is a joke to be honest. WinXP is perfectly 'flashy' enough for my needs in 'classic' view...

Dave

[jamieboy]

Mr Whippy said:

using all that memory to just run the OS is a joke to be honest.

...did you read the posts above, pointing out that it's meant to work like that.

How does having RAM sitting around completely unused benefit an OS? As compared to using that spare RAM for caching?

[Mr Whippy]

jamieboy said:

Mr Whippy said:

using all that memory to just run the OS is a joke to be honest.

...did you read the posts above, pointing out that it's meant to work like that.

How does having RAM sitting around completely unused benefit an OS? As compared to using that spare RAM for caching?

What is it caching, the shadows for the 'close window' button?

Or does it load all your apps commonly used into memory so when you press 'go' they load instantly?

Dave

[wolves_wanderer]

Ikemi said:

Don't touch Windows Vista with a barge pole! It's awful and incredibly slow!

Obviously "slow" depends on what machine you are using. I ran it on a machine very similar to the OP's and found it perfectly acceptable. As far as "awful" goes that is an opinion and not one shared by me. I find it superior to XP in almost every way.

[jamieboy]

Mr Whippy said:

What is it caching?

Stuff.

http://vistafaqs.com/viewfaq.aspx?faq=113
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/vistas-superfe...

[Mr Whippy]

jamieboy said:

Mr Whippy said:

What is it caching?

Stuff.

http://vistafaqs.com/viewfaq.aspx?faq=113
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/software/vistas-superfe...

Sounds like a double edged sword, shorter waiting times if you click what it has cached, but then slower if you don't while it has to empty the cache to fill it with what you want, then it re-fills spare space using even more system time...


I wonder what it could cache then. Games you play often? Programs you use like Photoshop and 3DS Max?

Still can't see why it needs maybe 750meg over WinXP to do that?

Anyone actually know what it's caching, not just that it does cache. Frow what I've briefly read it just seems like it's caching it's own OS stuff. Great, caching the contents of folders so when you navigate to them in the 3d application called 'windows at angles' it isn't slow, while just a nice 2d pane with 'details' view wouldn't need the cache in the first place.

It's just "Windows Eyecandy" if it wasn't bloated with visual/UI sparkly junk in the first place it'd probably twice as fast to not then NEED to have to cache things to draw back the speed!

Dave

[jamieboy]

Mr Whippy said:

Still can't see why it needs maybe 750meg over WinXP to do that?

Anyone actually know what it's caching, not just that it does cache. Frow what I've briefly read it just seems like it's caching it's own OS stuff.

To be honest, you need to read a bit less briefly to understand what it's doing.

The second article I linked to said:

SuperFetch is a sort of super-cache. If you start and close a certain application multiple times a day, the regular Windows XP cache will make that faster upon subsequent launches. However, if you reboot and if you launch other apps, this caching data is lost. SuperFetch analyzes your behavior over multiple sessions, and if you open, say, your email, browser, and chat in the morning, SuperFetch will load those apps into memory as soon as you start up your PC.

So that kind of explains what it caches, and kind of explains why it uses more memory than XP to do it.

[Mr Whippy]

But if your loading them anyway, every morning, they take just as long to load, because it all comes from the HDD...

I just use the 'sleep' function to achieve the same thing.

I think this is fair enough if you use a PC in 'lite' mode and do much the same thing with simple apps alot, but I personally don't want windows hogging resources to try make my life easier when I want 100% duty cycle for rendering images or writing to scratch disks, rather than windows thinking it's doing me a favour arsing around writing stuff to HDD.

If I want to run it, I'll ask for it and wait. If not, then don't bother

Yes it might be faster, but if I load them anyway, then why not just load them if they take the same space in memory? The rest of the time it's just running the HDD's and using CPU time that would be better spend elsewhere imho.

Not having a go at you of course, but it seems like a double edged sword. If they are run often, then I'll have them open as soon as I load windows, so I'm still waiting for it all to come of the HDD, so do I just wait longer before I can press the button to load the app, then it pops up quicker?

Then the rest of the time windows is wasting it's time loading things, making my current processes slower, so that I don't have to wait for something I might not actually end up running?

Sounds great for browser/movie/wordprocessor people, but give me a conventional workstation emphasis on power/resources/redundancy is spades for apps any day!

Dave

[jamieboy]

Mr Whippy said:

But if your loading them anyway, every morning, they take just as long to load, because it all comes from the HDD...

If you always start all the same applications straight away and never load anything else for the rest of the day, then you might be right.

But if you start your email and your browser, and then half an hour later start Visual Studio (or whatever) once you've caught up with what's going on in the world, then it should be quicker. For example, if you always run Excel at 11am, Vista will try to make sure it's cached and ready for you.

It runs as a low-priority app, so shouldn't noticably affect the performance of whatever else you have going on - obviously it will slightly, but not noticably.

To be brutal (in a friendly way ) you've come from not knowing the technology existed and wondering what was using up all your RAM, to knowing that it exists but thinking it's a waste of time - all over the course of this morning. My guess is that the OS architects at Microsoft have spent slightly longer looking at it.

[scorp]

Mr Whippy said:

Sounds like a double edged sword, shorter waiting times if you click what it has cached, but then slower if you don't while it has to empty the cache to fill it with what you want, then it re-fills spare space using even more system time...

Emptying a cache shouldnt take any time at all, i presume the cache is filled during idle time too (when IO is not being used) so filling it back up won't impede performance. The only worst case is when your trying to read something thats not in the cache to begin with, in which case you would read directly from the HDD or wherever.

Also the memory isn't "used" in the traditional sense, should an app come along and demand a gig of ram or whatever, the cache will be purged to make space.

Edited by scorp on Friday 31st August 14:40

[Mr Whippy]

No I totally understand, but when it comes to M$ I always approach with caution

I tend to like my OS doing what I want it to do, Win2k was my favourite OS really, WinXP is ultimately better but I just hate all the names/profiles/setups... arghhhh

Like now my bloody Adobe Aftereffects is bunging temp 5 min projects into my documents, which is on our work server. Why default to my documents. Even 3DS Max 9 puts folders in my 'user' folder.

It's MY PC, stop putting things in windows controlled folders under obscure folder names that are only easily navigatable to via the 'my documents' button


I'm stuck in my old ways, but some Linux versions are so much more intelligent operator orientated. I know WinXP is ultimately better than OS's of old, but there should be a 'not a dumbass' user option that just gives you full control of everything, with a simple UI without fancy this that and the other.

Even my games put save games in my documents now, I just want them in the game folder thanks!

So M$, yes it's probably better, but I want an OS that does what *I* want, not what it wants

Dave