TheVille

With everyone bashing Vista for the past year now that SP1 has been released to fix most of the complaints what is you guy's impressions?

Personally I had problems with RC1 but once the Retail version was released I have had little issues (basically same ones I usually have with XP) I don't use a lot of old hardware or software so maybe thats why, but I also was running a 2.0GHz with 1GB of ram and I was happy with performance. Also as a computer tech it makes fixing and diagnosing problems much easier. Plus you will NEVER get a BSOD from your display driver crashing since Windows has a backup one stored in memory. Anyways if you think it's a RAM hog, at least it's smart. XP won't actually use your RAM effectively it lets 90% of 2 GB sit idle, while Vista already has Steam and TF2 ready in memory for when I want to use it. Linux has been using your RAM effectively (and smarter) so why can't Windows?

Also if you hated Vista before try it with SP1 at least!

ive had a copy of Vista SP1 waitin to install once i decide to reinstall Vista... when i get a new HDD likely. Until then, that 64-bit version of Ultimate i has will be collecting dust.

When I got my new PC, it had Vista SP1 installed already. Love it.

Issues with SP1 that I have found,

Had a bunch of different problems with ATI drivers, once I uninstalled everything and uninstalled the driver from device manager and reinstalled it seems to have fixed my issues, beyond that everything else seems ok.

The only other problem I started having is with my USB thumbdrive, but it may be a problem with the drive haven't tried to look at it yet.

Where can you get SP1 for Vista? And what are the differences in it? I'm not computer savvy so I haven't really heard anything about it?

You can get it through Windows Update.

I've never had any major issues using Vista, so I don't really notice any improvement.

Thanks for letting me know it was out. I have only had very minor issues with Vista which involve an error message everytime I close TF2, Xfire screenshot capability in some games, and a recent steam bug. Other than that it has been very good for me. I can't imagine I will notice any performance differences since my computer is definitely good enough to run it without any issues.

SP1 is only available from Windows update if you don't have "problematic" drivers. Otherwise you have to get it from the windows download site. I had most of the downloads that were included in SP1 but none of my issues were fixed with it. My main problem is any game that uses the hl2.exe it will stop responding once I exit but I think vista is confused because it isn't responding since it's closed. Other than that most of my issues were fixed by running chkdsk

[quote="nesknowitall";p="81558"]My main problem is any game that uses the hl2.exe it will stop responding once I exit but I think vista is confused because it isn't responding since it's closed. [/quote]That's the only problem I have with Vista also. Otherwise it's been perfectly fine. I haven't noticed much of a difference over XP, but there are a few small changes that are nice.

The main improvement I have seen is that file copy is much faster over networks. I can now transfer a 500MB to 4GB file and it not take 3 hours to transfer to a computer on the same switch.

I really haven't had any problems with my Vista installation. TF2 crashes on exit, but that really doesn't affect anything.