Hello fellow Blenderheads! I’ve been thinking about upgrading to Vista. Now that it has matured and become stable, I can seriously consider purchasing it for my PC.
My current specs are:
AMD Sempron 2600 1.8ghz single core processor
Asus Nforce-2 motherboard
Nvidia Geforce 6200 128mb video card
2gb 400mhz DDR1 (2x1gb) ram
160gb harddisk
Not exactly fast. But, it has double the ram needed for good performance, and the processor is acceptable. The Geforce will have no problem displaying the special windows effects. And the hard drive offers more than enough space.
I probably won’t get it until I upgrade the mb, ram, and processor. I’m thinking about making a quad core 64bit system with 8gb of ram so that I can get the most out of Blender.
So I’m interested in learning your experiences from it. How well does it run on your computer, and what are your computer’s specs.
AH! dammit howitzer! my computer work fine with vista! AHHH!? your right about it being stable, AH DAMN! but it, takes, a little,… AH! while to get use to,… AHHG! DAMN! just like, arg,… reading this, AHHH, post, it may seem, ah DAMN, weird at first, but youll… … … get use to the bur… ning… AH!
4Gb ram
Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, T9300 (2.50GHz)
GeForce 8600 GT
320Gb Hard drive space More info here
Runs perfectly, very fast for rendering and can handle Crysis on medium/slightly high settings.
Its also on Vista, which i was at first not to happy about. But once i started using it ive found its very good. I haven’t had many issues with Vista, probably the same amount that ive had with XP.
There are some compatability issues but most have been worked out now and you can just download patches etc.
And on a side note all the computers at my Uni are about to be changed to Vista.
Hope that made more sense than the above post. :rolleyes:
Same specs as the guy above, but with 3 Gb of RAM instead.
I can tell you this: do install SP1, it makes copying files a lot faster.
I can also tell you there can be issues with Vista. My fully legit version displays a black desktop when it starts, and the only way to get rid of it is to start the Task Manager (Ctrl+Alt+Del, etc), kill explorer.exe and restart Explorer again. That will make the whole desktop load.
Vista bugs can be a little annoying, but it does look better than XP.
You might want to disable the search indexing service as well. It won’t slow down your system when you’ve got enough system memory, but it’s sure annoying as hell to have to hear your hard disk rattling at all times.
Also, keep in mind that Vista takes a lot of system memory. 2 Gb is not much for Vista.
My laptop came with Vista and after using it for about a year, I installed Linux on it.
Vista is nice, but it’s a resource beast, and you really don’t get much return. Vista would regularly consume almost a gig of memory while doing absolutely nothing. The 3d effects are anything but. Flip 3d is ridiculous. And even with the new service pack, copying files is reeeeeeeealy slow, comparatively speaking.
If all you want is a Vista look, stick with XP and get plugins
I agree with elam. There is really no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista (intentionally) other than M$ will be dropping support for XP just as soon as they can get away with it. But if it comes pre-installed on a system, then that’s different - you should have some recourse (hopefully) with the vendor if things start going haywire.
And as for the slow file copies: why in the heck does it have to “calculate remaining time” prior to transfer, for crying out loud? Is there a way to turn that “feature” (read: bug) off? :mad:
Yeah, Vista… Hated it , so much so that I erased it and threw away the disc. If you plan to do any animation I would warn you to avoid it. Vista is a huge resource hog, it runs countless programs in the backround, and I was running it on a duo core 2.5 gig hertz with 3 gig of ram and a very good nvidia graphics card. Go with a Mac operating system , or windows xp. Seriously avoid Vista if you can.
Yeah, MS gave me a copy of Vista Ultimate so I put it on my laptop, but it wasn’t very happy with it. It would crash every time I tried to copy a file or folder. Sound didn’t work either and I scoured the net looking for ways to fix it but many people with Gateway laptops had no sound with Vista.
I did like Readyboost though, I tossed in my 4gb flash drive and that sped things up. I wish more OS’s had that feature.
So I chucked it and installed Ubuntu, which runs nicely.
Reports on how well Vista runs with 2 gigs seem inconsistent. I have seen Windows XP run like a dog on new systems with 1 gig because of the vendor crap. I’m pretty sure Vista will run fine on my current system. You guys can run Ubuntu if you want, but I don’t want any of that politics coming with my os.
With 32 bit being limited to 4 gigs when ram is cheap and plentiful, Vista may be remembered as the os that pushed people to 64 bit and more ram. The system specs I’m shooting for will be considered low end by the time this decade is up.
Anyhoo, thanks to those of you who actually gave your experiences rather than your opinion.
With 32 bit being limited to 4 gigs when ram is cheap and plentiful, Vista may be remembered as the os that pushed people to 64 bit and more ram. The system specs I’m shooting for will be considered low end by the time this decade is up.
It seems to me that Vista is being remembered as the OS that pushed people to stay with XP or switch operating systems. It ain’t about resources really, but experience. There’s no compelling reason to upgrade to Vista and a lot of reasons not to.
But knock yourself out.
I installed Ubuntu not because of politics but because I’m finding it infinitely more useful and enjoyable than Vista. Compiz alone is worth it. It cracks me up that the Windows Devs had 6 years to develop Vista and all they came up with is Flip3d. Compiz development took about a year and it has so many features, I’m still discovering new things.
I have an older machine with 1.5BG RAM, an ATI 9800 Pro, and a Sempron 3200 processor. It runs Vista Business like a champ. It’s mostly the vendor crap on a pre load system that slows things down. The family machine is a fairly new dual core AMD, and it ran like a dog until I upped the memory from 1 GB to 2GB and went through and scraped out a bunch of the crap that HP had preloaded)
UAC is a compelling reason to use Vista over XP. You can have an admin login in XP, and other unprivledged log ins, but it is nothing like as clean as in Vista. The only downside is that there is a fair chunk of poorly written software that insists on running with administrative privledges (most hillariously, Visual Studio 2005). I’ve also had issues with service control applets (such as the one for Apache), because accessing the SCM is an administrative option by default (I think you can change that though).
I had Vista for a year, by the end of that time I moved to Ubuntu.
It was slow, easily using a gig of memory while I had nothing running, and had turned off as much as I could. And then when I disabled so much, I ended up with an ugly OS.
And copying files, well lets just say when it takes up to 3mins just to move a 2mb file into another folder, and during those 3mins the computer would lock up, using a computer gets unproductive.
My advice, stick with XP, or move to a unix like system.
Oh, and the partitioner is a joke in Vista, it only gives you like 10% of your HDD to partition.
I’ve avoided upgrading to Vista for a couple reasons: #1 - The only time I wasn’t burned badly upgrading a Windows version was going from 98sp2 to XPsp2 - effectively leap-frogging the more notorious versions. #2 - (mentioned by many here) Vista is resource hog.
My consumer-type (non-techie) friends who went with Vista on their new laptops like it just fine, and I can see why; they’ve had no problems and generally never need the vast GB of memory their systems boast.
But my techie buddies begrudge the resources Vista swallows up, and prefer anything else.
So… be very careful considering an upgrade. It’s a different matter if you’re setting up a new system and don’t mind Vista squatting over a large section of your RAM.
I havent had any issues [PERMISSION DENIED] using Vista [YOU MUST BE LOGGED ON AS ADMINSTRATOR TO USE THE KEYBOARD] although I must admit it is a little [ACCESS TO THAT NETWORK DEVICE IS PROHIBITED] parnoid about things. It does turn out that [ADMINISTATOR PRIVILEDGES REQUIRED] Norton was actually blocking my ability to see my other PCs that were within my firewall [WINDOWS FIREWALL IS DISABLED AND YOU MAY BE AT RISK TO VIRUS INFECTION WHICH MAY LEAD TO DEATH. ENABLE WINDOWS FIREWALL NOW?] but once I got that firgured out it hardly gives me any errors [LATESTED AUTOMATIC UPDATE HAS DISABLED DVD BURNING WHICH ALSO MEANS YOU CANNOT MAKE BACKUPS. CANNOT VERIFY BACKUP INTEGRITY. THIS COMPUTER MAY BE AT RISK FOR BEING USED TO PIRATE SOFTWARE. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO BURN A DVD OR CONTINUE USE OF KEYBOARD.] I know it runs Blender great! [YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. KEYBOARD DISABLED. YOU MAY ONLY MOUSE CLICK NOW, YOU IGNORANT HUMAN]
Vist aint too bad, but its definitely not fantastic. Its ‘security’ measures are often overkill, and compatability is iffy. Ive had fairly major issues with my soundcard and recording workflow due to compatability problems. Also, the Account Control thing has reset a couple of times, causing all my custom Blender directories to dissapear(thus losing many very important files. Basicly I lost everything since last november when I really started using custom directories)… So dont do that and you should be good
Performance-wise, I havent had many problems at all, but:
The ‘Sidebar’(equivilent of widgets on a mac) take up a lot of ram. You can kill the process on this one, so its not too huge an issue, and in fact, with mid range dual cores it really doesnt even slow down my rendering that much(Ive run an indigo render, a medium intensive yafray render, and a blender render while watching streaming HD on the net and been fine).
The 3d window scroller(the process is named ‘window manager’) takes up a lot of ram as well. Unfortunately, if you get rid of this process, its basicly like killing the ‘explorer’ process, and your screen goes blank for a minute, at which point it starts it back up again.
Vista is not as bad as most folks make it out to be. Im sorry, I dont really care what you linux users say, Ive used quite a few OS’s, and Vista is not nearly the pile of $#it they make it out to be.
However, like I said before, its nothing fantastic, so dont get it for the sole sake of upgrading, especially since youre running a single core. If you do decide to upgrade, get the Home Basic edition(less processor/ram intensive).
