SZ240, Go7400, FFXI and Vista

I have a Sony SZ240 with a GF Go7400. I've had it for a year now and I love it. The only game I play on it is Final Fantasy XI ... I have a little addiction. I have used the "S" line for a few years now and have had no issues running FFXI on my old S470 and now my correct SZ240 with Windows XP. However in a recent experiment I gave Vista a try. I followed the installation guide (which is so great!) on this forum and everything went perfectly until I tried to play FFXI. It ran, but the frame-rate was unplayable. I switched back to XP right away. This was about 3-4 months ago and I'm curious to see if there has been any progress with the drivers as I'm looking to install Vista again. What driver should I be using? Has anyone has a better experience with a Go7400 on Vista for FFXI and do you have any tips.

Thanks for your help

 

I would not recommend getting Vista at this point in time. It is not worth it - XP is a much more stable operating system. It has better performance on the whole, especially for gaming. You'll take roughly a 20 percent performance decrease in Vista compared to XP. And XP has the best compatibility.

Don't bother with Vista. I used it for seven months and then went back to XP.

 

I agree, you need to have a very very powerfull system to run Vista if you do, then I recommend Vista. a mobile 7400... not good enough.

my desktop runs vista and its great! but I don't play FFXI... I play a lot RTS games, like Supreme Commander. and my desktop with vista runs it great!

 

The system is definitely good enough to run Vista. As long as the machine has a dual-core CPU and 2GB of RAM not much more is needed for smooth sailing. Vista is simply so bloated that it is very slow and cumbersome to use. I found that it actually hampered my productivity instead of improving it. Vista has a pretty face but that's about it.

 

The performence will get better with time though right? I'm not going to lie ... I do like the pretty face ... and yes my laptop has a Dual-core and 2GB of Ram.

 

What he meant was that if you have a new enough GPU there is very little gaming performance deficit associated with Vista. With only a Go7400 though, you'll always do better in XP.

And yes, Vista is getting better with time, and is probably already significantly better than when you tried it.

 

Cool ty for all the help! One more question, if I do give it a second try ... which I think I might what driver version should I be using ie. which have people had the most success with?