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So I found a good gaming laptop for a good price (2k for 17" 4gb DDR2, 2.4Ghz core 2 duo, 8700M GT) and the company is offering both XP and Vista.  The choices I am looking at is Vista Home Premium and XP Pro.  I do not know if either is 32 or 64 bit so I am assuming 32bit.  I know that 32bit XP will only see 3.5Gb of ram instead of the full 4 gigs (does Vista 32bit recognize  a full 4gb?) but I don't think that's a bad tradeoff if Vista itself is too memory intensive.

Anyways, I've heard a lot of bad things about Vista (though less with Sp1) so I decided to ask here.  Which is better for me to get with my gaming laptop, vista or xp pro?

XP and 32 bit Vista have a memory limit of 3GB.

If you want 4 GB, go with Vista 64.

Problem is, vista driver support is still a little wonky, and the 64 bit OS is somewhat more wonky than that.

If you can be patient with a few crashes now and then, vista SP1 is right around the corner.

Well the company only offers 1gb, 2gb, and 4gb of ram.  I chose 4 because I'd rather have more than 2, and it's a good upgrade price from 2 to 4 ($75).

There are probably some benchmarks out there that show framerates for games on Vista and XP with the same hardware.  Last I heard it's a pretty staggering difference (like 30% fewer frames per second with Vista due to all the overhead that it adds).

Do you want to play a DX10 game?

If not, XP.

The first thing I did when I got my new laptop was to wipe the vista install and put XP on it. Vista is just not worth it for any machine you intend to game on unless you want to play DX10 or are okay with having to fuck around with the many games that don't like it.

I've yet to have a problem with a game using Vista. I don't have a Schild-like collection, but here's a list that I've been fine with:

Witcher
EQ
EQ2
Planetside
Wow
Eve
LoTR
Bioshock
Hellgate London
Company of Heroes
IL-2 Sturmovik 1946
C&C 3
Crysis
Vanguard


Not that I'm crazy about the OS; it needs a lot of help, but it isn't this spawn of satan everyone paints it out to be. It even has some improvements over XP, such as a better diagnostic suite. As far as overhead is concerned, most of the stuff that hogs Vram can be shut off entirely.

That said, I wouldn't put too much hope into SP1; from all reports, its not going to improve performance by much, and in some scenarios it will decrease performance.

I'm a Vista user too and it seems to work fine 99% of the time.

I'd say go Vista because of DX10 and hopefully they will fix the issues.

I have a MMORPG you might be interested in.

For pre-DX10 gaming there is no reason to go Vista, there are improvements to be had by picking up the OS but they are not in gaming.

As for games that throw tantrums in Vista I've run across a few, BF2142 and Deus Ex being the ones I can recall. I eventually got BF2142 working but it's a pain in the ass I'd rather not have.

I went Vista x64 for precisely this reason, and it really hasn't been bad.  Some of my older games, like Thief 3, Bloodlines, and Freedom Force either don't work, or are a little bit glitchy, otherwise, it's been great.  Games like Crysis show a noticeable improvement when you run the 64 bit executable instead of the standard 32 bit.  My biggest gripe is that Gametap hasn't gotten off their asses and made their encryption scheme work under x64, so I've got a yearlong subscription going to waste.

That said, there's a reason I haven't gone back to 32 bit Windows.  The RAM is worth it.

I haven't noticed a difference between 2GB and 4GB on Vista 32bit. Seems to work about the same. Maybe it makes a difference to games.

Big difference is between 1GB and 2GB.  Me and my daughter have laptops with roughly equivalent specs, but mine has 2GB and hers has 1GB.  It takes something like 850MB just to load the operating system, which makes hers run like a dog if she opens up anything more than the browser.  Mine runs just fine (probably would suck at games, but it's a notebook computer with a 12.1 inch screen, I won't be playing games on it much).

--Dave

Nevermind.

Xp.

No OS should take as much system resources as vista.

I've used Vista desktops with 1, 2, and 3 gigs of ram (none had 4), using the same apps.  Other hardware is pretty comparable on the first two, with the 3 gig system being a bit better.

The 1GB machine is probably slightly less painful than using a rusted cheese grater on your private bits.  Never, never go with just 1GB.  Buy yourself an abacus and do all your calculations with that instead.

2GB is pokey, but workable.

3GB was decent performance but still wasn't gaming quality, although since they were office machines and not designed for it, it wasn't really surprising.

My home machine uses Vista 32 with 2 gig ram@800mhz and it does just fine with most games. That said, the whole point of DX10 and now 10.1 is that its a whole different way of handling graphics, and we've not yet seen many games adopt the new graphics architechture. Its sure to evolve over the next years, but for now, chances are you'll get better gaming performance out of WinXP, simply because Vista is in essense running in 'compatibility' mode running DX9. Its good enough, but not really what it was ostensibly designed for.

Here's what Microsoft Execs think of Vista:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09digi.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=16c93380cf8296d8&ex=1205294400

Pretty sad.

My 8700 doesn't seem to play very nice with Vista. I've turned to hacked drivers to get it work properly, and I'm still having a fair number of 'Display Driver stopped responding, but has recovered' messages.

I've got a new 8700 on the way (under warranty) to replace the one currently in my laptop, but I'm not counting on it making a difference.

Unless you absolutely need DX10, go with XP. On a laptop, you've already various constraints. Vista shitting up your performance shouldn't be an additional one.

That goes triple time if any of your hardware will already be sharing your system resources (Ram ETC..).

If Intel builds it they will come.  I think Vista has failed on many levels but i'm not going to begrudge an OS for being a little piggy when the hardware to allow for that is cheap and plentiful.  Of course I am not entirely in agreement with M$ on which bits of the OS deserve to feast on my resources.

We tried running Vista on some of our work machines and it was not a pleasant experience… …it was incompatible with the anti-virus, gave the Exchange server setup grief, caused problems for other specialty type software we run… …thankfully, I don't fret over it since my Windows @ work is just a Parallels virtual disk…

…and if they stop selling XP (I don't know what the status of the cutoff is now, haven't payed attention, but in a few months, XP is no longer going to be sold)… …bossman (also manages the network too) who gives us Mac users a hard time may enact a wholesale switch himself…

Is Vista still crippled with DRM crap?