Safe Speed Forums

I know they will work with the auxillary supply missing, I just find the nag screen annoying.
On the plus side, the 6800 GS draws an absolute maximum of 75W if it's being worked flat out - so he might just get away with that 300W supply if it can provide something near what it claims.

As for installing Vista on that machine

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

Fixed that for you

All joking aside for a minute, I don't think Vista is as bad as it's portrayed. In fact, I'll bet those doing the complaining are the same people who said XP was crap when they migrated from 9x (it's easier for them to slate something when they don't know how it works).

Aside from that ba$tard UAC nag screen (which can be disabled), about the only real niggle I've had with it, is it occasionally slows right down to 100Mbit speeds when doing file transfers over a network.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

To be fair, I installed it the other day (64bit version too!) and despite it's problems I have to grudgingly admit I quite like it, yes I'm even using Aero which is fine once you get rid of the stupid 4 pixel border padding (that I'm sure they only put there to show off the glass effect) since older programs don't recognise it and don't position themselves correctly. Flip3D is a massive improvement over Alt+Tab too, or rather it is now that I've used a small hack to bind it to the 6th button on my mouse.

Most of the problems I'm having are ATIs fault, I am rapidly getting tired of losing my multi monitor configuration at every reboot and having the position of my monitors swapped after the screensaver comes on (don't think that one is ATIs fault)

And XP was crap when it first came out. Always wait until the service pack before buying a new Microsoft product. Vista has improved in that regard though. NT4 didn't become usable until SP5, 2K until SP3, XP until SP2 and Vista is doing pretty well at SP1.

That said while writing this I notice that Vista has put my clock back an hour for no obvious reason, was fine last night (yes my timezone setting is correct)

The main problems that people had (have) with Vista are down to the fact that,

a) For the most part "Upgrading" doesnt really work very well, especially if you have years worth of acccumulated aplications and programs on your PC. Loads of people find that after "Upgrading" to vistamany older apps simply wont work.

b) the "Minimum specs" are hopelessly optimistic, yes you can run vista on a "Mimimum spec" machine, but frankly you would be beter off using a pencil and paper. Both owners and the cheaper manufacturers fell foul of this to begin with.

to get vista to work well you need a fairly high end machine and a clean load.

Then its just fine!

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

I've had Vista Ultimate (32 bit) running on a 3½ year old machine for about 6 months now, and I really can't see one single advantage over XP.
Sure it's aesthetically pleasing, but you can achieve the Vista appearance in XP quite easily with the numerous custom packs out there.

As I said above, the only real issue I've found that bugs me is the network transfer speeds which is enough for me to go back to XP shortly.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

Yes, I agree that, for most people, Vista doesn't offer any benefit over Xp. At work we have decided to just sit tight and bypass Vista altogether.

It's a big laugh when new PCs equipped with Vista offfer a "free downgrade" to Xp.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

I have always liked using Old OS/Apps on modern machines.

(A 3 gig machine running win 98SE and Office 2000 absolutly flys!)

Unfortunatly you can no longer get the drivers for the lastest hardware and much recent software is not backward compatable

I have reluctantly switched to XP appart from my Games Machine which is pretty fast and came preloaded with vista. (First PC in a box I have bought for over 10 years, but it was sooo cheap and works just fine)

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"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Upgrading a Microsoft OS has never really worked well, always format and reinstall, it'll be less headache and less time wasted in the long run (doubly so if you partition your hard drive and keep your data on the other partition)

The biggest problems I'm having is that NX client, which I use to access my Linux terminal server, doesn't work well with Vista 64, I get two "this program has stopped responding" type errors as it connects to my Linux box but then it connects anyway and like I already mentioned it doesn't understand the new "Border Padding" window metric so positions the windows slightly too high and too far to the left until I turned off the padding.

Half Life 2 and Half Life 2: Lost Coast don't work in 64bit mode, they hang on the loading screen, very annoying. The workaround is to use the 32bit versions.

Crysis looks a lot nicer and I can run higher graphics settings than I could on XP. Bioshock, supposedly the poster child for DX10, looks exactly the same!

Hibernate mode works a hell of a lot better in Vista, I dunno why, my guess is that before hibernating it flushes it's cache and then only stores to disk the bits of memory currently in use, wheras XP would dump the entirety of your system memory to disk.

In theory the hardware accelerated GUI should improve responsiveness a bit, there's no longer any need to request that an application redraw itself once you minimise a window that was hiding it.

UAC is annoying so you turn it off, but when it's your mothers machine and your sick of the monthly visits to clean off spyware then you leave UAC on

All in all, if you're comfortable with using XP and don't need DirectX 10 for games there probably isn't much that's going to sell you on Vista. If you're new to computers or found XP too difficult to use then Vista is probably worth a look. Also if it came with your PC you may as well use it.

One thing which differentiates Xp from 98SE is that Xp definitely does not crash as much (nowhere near as much!) so this is a good update. I agree about Office 2000 - so much nicer and more practical than 2007.

"You look like you want to .... Let me help."

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

The other thing that differentiates them is that XP can deal with more than 512MB of physical RAM, and the reason it doesn't crash is because XP is Windows 2000 with the added "benefit" of a few hand holding wizards and a bit of eye candy.

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What makes you think I'm drunk officer, have I got a fat bird with me?

There's a bit more under the bonnet than just 2000 with eye candy, it's been so long since I looked into it though that I can't remember what else there was.

Also there is a way to get 98SE to use more than 512MB. I forget the details but have a look for the unofficial 98SE service pack. There's still people keeping Win98 alive even today though a lot of it involves nicking components from ME and 2K that can be made to work in 98. Worth it if you're building an old school games box though

(unless you want to play really old school games, then just use DosBox)

I would rather run a modern O/S on old hardware.

Ubuntu 8.10 on a PII 266 laptop with 310MB of RAM and a 6GB HDD, with one minor tweak to get it to switch off on shutdown everything works and it's performance is better than my 2GHz P4 when it's running XP.

I really don't see any point in trying to run Win9.x with all it's vulnerabilites, burdened with antivirus and firewall, when you can get better functionality for free.

Unless you need an actual good office suite and/or compatibility with MS office formats. Openoffice is broken, slow and generally unpleasant to use.

98lite, or nLite (for XP and 2000) are also worth looking at if you need stuff to run on older hardware.

(FWIW, my main browsing is done from Gentoo on a 1.4GHz Athlon XP-M system)

Opinion or fact? I've had others tell me similar but none ever backed it up with any examples. Personally I've never had a problem.

For me it's faster and easier to use than Microsoft's bloated and bewildering suite. But then, like most people I only need to knock up the odd simple spreadsheet, nothing more complicated than totalling up a column, and write a simple letter every couple of months.

I'd wager that if you took an office of a thousand people, replaced the MS Office suite with OO, that you'd only get a couple actually noticing the change. And how much does an MS office licence cost these days?

A bit of both, it certainly doesn't render MS Word documents the same as MS Word does. You can argue that this is MS's fault because of how poorly documented the format is (and for that matter what a terrible format it is) and you'd be correct, however that still doesn't help the poor sod who is applying for a job and all the recruiters insist on MS Word CVs and said person's CV ends up looking a right mess because he did it in OpenOffice. On my old CV for example OOo failed to render the bullet points correctly, and also decided that the fonts were just ever so slightly bigger such that the bottom two entries on each page dropped to a new page. Once I was done editing it I had to open it in a copy of Word on my Work laptop just to be safe, then correct all the messed up bits, eventually I just gave up and did the whole thing in Word.

I'll admit that the newer versions of MS Office are getting annoying to use too. 2000 and 97 are the best, shame they're not updating them any more to fix the security holes. For 97 I have a nice collection of every update you have to apply, with them all renamed into ISO format date order so they go on in the right order if you sort them alphabetically. Takes ages, but still quicker than recompiling OpenOffice