Im Fed up of vista freezes and i'm switching to xp. Your experiences?

I'm totally fed up of vista crashes , not to mention the bsods, and audio crackling issues and performance drop using it under vistual os. Virtual os was not as snappy as running xp. SO now i say bye bye vista and Hello xp. What are your experiences on xp? Does the machine get as hot as on vista? 65-74c while surfing on the net and listening to music? Does it have the famous audio crackling issues? Is it as buggy and slow as vista? Also what are your gaming temps? Is the fan management working correctly? I NEED FEEDBACKS....

 

I'm using Vista as well, and I've probably solved 95% of all the issues with the original Apple Drivers. I'm having zero crashes and BSODs, and very good performance. What I found with the original Apple drivers and utilities is that it causes a lot of latency issues, if you run a program called dpclat.exe you will see that audio and streaming video is absolutely horrid. I have scoured the forums and found the solutions here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9447615&tstart=0

It's totally not vista to blame, but Apple's fault.

 

Make sure your posts are helpful and constructive, otherwise keep your comments to yourself. I had to delete several posts.

 

should have done that a while ago, i gave up on the 2nd month and couldnt be happier

 

My Santa Rosa used to be as hot, not sure the new one tho.

The audio cracking happened on my 5793 as well. I'd say it's a vista thing rather than MBP thing. Reserved back XP and solved the problem.

XP is faster and less buggy.

Over 90C, again it's the old one with 8600M.

There's a third party app which allows you to control fan manually, up to 6000rpm (I think?). (I couldn't really feel the airflow however, just the noise)

 

I haven't had a chance to use Vista on my macbook, been using XP for games.
I haven't measured the temps while in XP, but I notice almost as soon as I start a game, the fans kick on high and stay there until I get back to the desktop. Which I think is not good when I lose hours and hours of my time playing a game at a time (poor fans ).
The other thing I've noticed is, if XP enters sleep mode, I cannot enable my ethernet connection without a reboot. It keeps saying "connection failed!". I never had that issue with the intel chipset macbook, so it might be something funky with the nvidia drivers.
Other than that, it's been totally stable for me, no BSOD's, no freezes, or crashes. I'm just really worried about the fan running on high for so long, I don't want it going out like the last one did, especially considering I've read that the fans in the macbooks tend to go out fairly frequently.

 

Thanks for your inputs. I will revert back to xp next week. My machine is not freezing now. But simply surfing the net, i'm seeing upper 60's and lower 70's. This is unacceptable for a laptop.

 

I mean, it's always pretty hot for me in Windows, may it be Vista or XP. XP has been a bit cooler though, with the average temps running in the mid 50's with surfing Firefox and listening to some YouTube tunes. I never have any audio popping or cracking as you described, and I'm running Nvidia's 179.48. Nothing has been bad at all. Vista has been pretty hot, with similar temperatures as you mentioned. BTW, it's been great for games too, as I get a slight performance increase with XP as compared to Vista.

 

Hmm, I haven't had any audio crackling or anything, but I noticed in some older games, the audio quality is poor. Not sure why. I tried playing around with different settings and it never helped.
Nvidia seems to be doing very well on the "backward compatibility" front as always. Although the sound driver/chip is RealTek, the chipset is still nvidia (which all components have to communicate with), so I'm thinking it's more of an nvidia chipset/driver issue than anything since I didn't have this problem with my former intel macbook.
I'm starting to think that with some of the video, and now apparently audio compatibility issues this new macbook has with some older games, that didn't exist with my previous intel macbook, I'm starting to think apple could have chosen a better platform than nvidia. I'll be especially upset if this chipset fails (which means a new motherboard replacement) like other nvidia chips in the past have been known to do.
Sorry to get a little off topic there.

 

Is windows 7 similar to XP in terms of heat and stability for games and basic applications.

 

It is for me, but it's a bit hotter and slower, but that's expected.

 

What are the BSOD codes? 99% of the time, BSOD are induced by hardware incompatibility/malfunction or poorly written driver. So, most likely either Apple or your Macbook(pro) should probably take the blame for your poor Vista experience.

Virtual machines will almost always be slower than a real machine. That's a known fact.

Crackling issues on audio output line is almost always due to poorly written driver, improperly designed hardware (e.g. proper grounding..etc) or the limitation of hardware.

The high temperature running on Windows is probably due to the improperly written driver for Windows and probably the incompatibility with some of the power saving features on Macbook (pro). If it's true that Windows cannot fully utilize all the power saving features due to poorly written driver or have poor driver for controling the fan speed, then that will sure cause overheating on your Macbook (Pro).

XP should be quite a bit more responsive inside a virtual machine than Vista because of the way the 2 operating system is designed. Vista tends to require more resource to run than XP. But majority of laptops you buy today have enough system resourced for Vista so the usual "memory hog" or other "annoyances"..etc are not a problem. Vista have much better power managment on fully compatible laptops and should run at about the same temperature and battery life as XP.

 

Have you tried Windows 7 RC?

So far it seems to be running OK on my MB.


.

 

Right, I posted a link with all the available fixes for Vista.

Driver issue mainly. There's a few badly written utilities and driver versions (mainly BROADCOM is to blame) that needs to be either disabled or replaced by a newer available 3rd party driver. Apparently the Apple KBDmgr utility causes dpc slowdowns, and the WIFI driver that comes with Boot camp has a severe memory leak / bad cpu utilization.

Most people don't realize the fact that the MacBook Pro isn't designed like other notebooks with massive fans and heatsinks. The unibody aluminum design acts as an extended heatsink, mainly because of the thin design of the system and because Apple wanted also to keep the noise levels at a suitable level. And like most silent SFFs or PCs, the systems run a little warmer than usual, but not outside of thermal limits. Running 60-70 degrees is still within regualr CPU and GPU operating temperatures.

The other thing that most people overlook is that when running in OS X they usally use "Better Battery" Mode, which is utilizing only the 9400M only simply because there are no games or other utilities/software that could really take advantage of the 9600M GT. So comparing temps between OS X and Vista are obviously going to be different, compound that with bad drivers and constant CPU utilization, it's obvious that the temps are not going to be ice cold. Like I said though, with the fixes it's better, but keep in mind the design of the notebook in the first place and I knew from the beginning that the Unibody MBP was going to be a warmer than the usual machine.

OP I suggest you look into my post above and majority of your issues will be resolved. Trust me, I was in the same boat like 6 months ago when I first got it.

 

Yes windows is not to be blamed in this case. Apple has clearly badly written the drivers. I have a feeling that the bootcamp supplied in snow leopard will fix this problem, because the one supplied with the unibodies is a heavily patched one. Notice that the previous gen mbp owners do not complain about audio crackling. I come from a dell vostro 1700. my temps while surfing on the net was 50's c and 60's c while gaming.

@d3x: I have installed latest broadcom drivers and the audio crackling has decreased considerably but still exists on a small scale.

My laptop boots up on the 70's in vista, the fans kick up and then gradually decreases to 68c. It's like a loop. Temp increases, fans go up, temp decreases, fans go down. and this repeats on and on.

Windows 7 is nearly the same thing as vista with the same temps. I notice the multitouch trackpad is also a problem because when i play games like crysis and bioshock and my hand scrolls or touches the trackpad, the audio would go bad, making noises like "crik crack". saving and restarting the whole game would solve this problem.

Do you think my temps are normal for vista on a unibody macbook pro? Isn't that amount of heat damaging my hardware or decreasing its lifetime?

booting up:70's c
surfing on the net:upper 60's c and lower 70's c
gaming 76-80-82c

 

I know that KBDMgr (Boot Camp Tray Icon) also causes audio issues. Unfortunately only using workaround scripts like Boot CampED really work or killing the entire process eliminates any type of lagging.

You might want to disable the trackpad before gaming. That might solve your little issue there.

I would say that the temps are completely normal. Notice that the temperatures never go beyond 90'c, personally I think that the CPU and GPU temps are purposely designed to run at that temperature stock on the Unibody MBP, and no, these temperatures will not damage or decrease it's lifetime at least not at a significant amount.

 

yes, my temps have never gone beyond 90. your making me feel relieved. i was getting desperate. my sister will soon buy a lenovo t500. i was going to ask her to exchange hers with mine but i won't now!!!