Vista Premium

I know that Vista reduces your fps and proformance by about 5-10%, but does anyone know if this applies to Vista Premium? Because the minimum req. for Premium is at least 1BG and at least a DX9 gpu with 2.0 shader.

 

The performance drop is just a result of immature graphics drivers, and affects all versions of Vista equally.

 

Vista Wont slow it down any If you have a nice ammount of RAM. 2gb should get you blazing on vista.

 

The early tests that showed XP outperforming Vista were done with immature drivers, at least on Nvidias end. Early ATI tests actually have shown Vista outperforming XP, however since Nvidia currently has the best cards at the moment, this doesn't do us gamers much good. Hopefully Nvidia will get their acts together and release some decent Vista drivers.

 

Gaming performance will take a "small" hit in vista compared to XP, but its not near enough to warrant bypassing vista at this stage of the game. Just be sure to use the most current driver revisions that you can, Dell hasnt updated their Nvidia driver in ages(most companies seldom update their drivers often enough), and gaming with the 7400 and Dells vista driver is absolutely horrible, however, once you install a recent driver revision, the only thing holding me back is the card itself. Info to drivers can be found in the stickies.

 

The 58's are a really good driver set, running them on both my laptop and my desktop, those pretty much cleared up all my major issues with my desktop aside from the lack of NVIEW desktop management which hasnt been available in any vista driver set( I miss having separate backgrounds on my dual displays..) I've heard mixed reviews on the latest beta set. The 58's are solid stable drivers, at least on my two primary machines.

 

Premium is actually worse on resources than standard basic vista, the areo interface is what eats up all the system resources.

In games tho, they should be the same as vista unloads those resoruces mostly when you enter a game.

 

I don't think you quite understand what Aero is actually trying to accomplish. It is not there to simply "eat up resources" but rather to let the GPU handle more of the load than the CPU. So, yes, if you have an inferior GPU it may cause some performance problems.

However, since Aero can be turned off with a simple mouse click, premium suffers no performance disadvantages to basic in any way.

 

If you turn off areo you dont have premium anymore thats called vista basic thats the main diffrence between the two minus a few things.

So that comparison you just made is no diffrent than saying well "doom3 is no harder on your system than pac man for atari. If you just manually put the game on 8bit color and turn the resolution down to 50x50 it will perform exactly the same)

sure the areo interface is accelerated by your gpu, it doesnt change the fact that it eats up a TON more ram, or that the cpu has to work with the gpu to render things. In turn it eats up alot more system resources.

so what was the point you were trying to make???

 

There is a good bit more to Home Premium than just areo, your analogy is a good bit off the mark, what would be closer would be saying HP is like running Doom3 in DX9 mode and Basic like running Doom3 in DX7 mode, The same task is accomplished, just without a little extra flair and a few bells and whistles. Bottom line, if you have a modern machine with at least one GB of ram, Vista is the way to go on a new machine, chances are your going to need it or want it in the near future, the only notable exception could be if you "have" to run a G80 SLI setup, as thats not working in vista right now, but thats not very common for most users, especially mobile users.

 

The only point I was making is that premium is actually harder on the system than basic. Your totally off on a diffrent point that nobody was debating in the first place.

 

Uh.... Aero turns off in the background. It does not eat resources while gaming.

 

The point I was making is that its foolish to avoid home premium strictly for gaming, todays average machines are more than capable of running vista HP with a negligible performance hit in gaming, basic wont offer you any real improvement, and the performance gap between vista and XP is virtually closed.

 

I just started using Vista Premium, and find it difficult and confusing. It has setting choices for every opened function. The explanations are vague, and goes like, "Greatest version, Recommended. Good version. Or, Common version." Afraid of making mistakes, I have avoided making selections on most of these so far.

I thought everything was fixed and ready in the package!

I opened Office, to use the Word program. But then a sign says I must have a Product Key code to use Word. Either the key for a Trial version or for a Full version. And it costs money! If I don't get the key, I am told Word will not function properly. What is this all about? Is not Word automatically included in Vista Premium?

 

Please do not bring back old threads.

Word is a separate product that is not included in Vista. It costs money, and you're asking for a key to get it for free (aka stealing) right?

Closed.