Vista performance update

mhatch — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 09:55:00 GMT

I finally got my secondary display working - by buying a different video card. I went with an ATI X1300 series with 256Mb RAM. Performance overall was still pretty poor, and although this video card has more RAM, it was actually rated lower (4.1) by the Windows benchmark than the NVidia 128Mb card I was running before (4.4). After futzing with defrag, turning off Aero, and generally feeling the pain, I finally ordered a second 1Gb of RAM. Man did that do the trick! Windows Media Center used to take 5 minutes to launch, and now it comes right up. The Windows benchmark didn't change much though - funny how in real use the performance difference was huge, but the way Vista runs the perf tests it didn't report any difference between 1Gb and 2Gb of RAM.

First experiences installing Vista Ultimate at home

mhatch — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 09:07:00 GMT

I brought home Vista Ultimate now that we've RTM'ed to install it on my home machine. The machine is an HP Media Center m7170n Pentium D 3Ghz dual core with 1Gb RAM and a custom XFXForce Dual DVI video card (NVidia 6600 chipset). Single 220Gb HD.

I was running XP Pro (x86), so first hurdle was that I couldn't upgrade to the x64 version. I expected this, so did all the necessary items: uninstalled most apps, backups, full defrag (I used a trial copy of PerfectDisk8 to do a full defrag and coalesce all the files) and then booted from the DVD to install. The installation went flawlessly, and compared to previous versions of Windows, really didn't take all that long - I didn't time it, but it took me a couple of days to prep, the 1 hour install was the easy part. Aero glass looks great

The next two hurdles: no sound, and I couldn't get my secondary display on. I fixed the sound problem with RealTek drivers (High Definition Audio Codecs) on their website (HP uses RealTek HD Audio chipset on the mb).

I haven't been able to get the secondary display working, even after installing the beta Vista ForceWare drivers from NVidia's web site. I'll be checking around internally on Monday to see if this is a known/fixable problem.

Long story short: before installing Vista x64, make sure you have x64 or Vista drivers for your hardware, as the native drivers may or may not work. I bought this refurb machine planning to run Vista, but it doesn't have the 'Vista certified' logo on it, so I took the risk. I wonder how many customers are going to struggle trying to put Vista on older machines - maybe the only risky thing is trying to run the x64 OS because at least the x86 XP drivers will likely work in most cases (I'm not certain of this though.

mike hatch's blog : Vista

Vista performance update

First experiences installing Vista Ultimate at home