Vista for gaming

It's not a question of if its better than XP, like a lot of people are asking. I'm currently without a Windows license, and so I might as well get DX10 for the future. My question is, will I be alright with Home Basic?

I use Linux for everything that matters, I have no desire to surf or email or code in Windows. If I listen to music, it's not going to be with MS software. I've played with the Business edition in the past (sold it with my T60), and I know I have absolutely no desire for Aero.

I just want to play games. Will a higher end version have any benefit whatsoever?

 

How much RAM do you have? Usually gaming with Vista is dependant on your RAM. for instance, I have 1 gig, and I can't play any games because Vista eats up 400 mb's of that RAM. It sucks. I'm currently using Premium, so I'm hoping Basic will get rid of all the extra proccesing crap that eats up RAM in Premium, so I'm looking for a answer to this too!

 

As Methodis noted, if you want to play games on Vista instead of on XP, you'll need to add 1 gig of RAM to see equivalent performance on Vista as compared to XP, due to (how do I put this?) the way Vista (wastes) eats memory.

 

Currently 2GB, just ordered another 2GB. Oh... I'll have to look into that, if 32bit just won't see that last ~1GB or if it will cause problems.

I'm running a GeForce 7950GT 512MB, Gigabyte GA-P965-DQ6, and HT Omega Striker sound. That's with an E6400, and the aforementioned 4GB DDR2-800.

 

I'm running a E4300, GeForce 7500LE(Ew. HP ****) with 1 GIG of RAM and Vista constantly, CONSTANTLY, crashes or doesn't load programs. Gaming is pretty much out of the question; I bought STALKER and it takes 11 minutes, yes MINUTES (I timed it) to load it up, and then it's only like..2FPS because of the amount of RAM Vista unnnesecarily eats up. So Gaming with Vista is pretty much required that you have 2 gigs atleast I would say.

 

You definitely need at least 2 gigs. I was able to have fun on Tomb Raider in Vista on 2gigs, but throughout, my memory usage was well over 1 gig, per the task manager. You must understand that on a 2 gig system, you will likely consume 900-1000mb of memory from simply using Vista while surfing the net, playing music, and using a torrent client.

If you want to game, either max out your system, or save hundreds of dollars in upgrades and simply game in XP.

 

Yeah... I have enough memory. I would just stick with XP, but I really don't like giving money to Microsoft, and would rather just have DX10 from the start.

I decided to pick up Home Basic 64 bit OEM, by the way. I probably would have gotten retail if it came packaged with a 64 bit disc. I really don't want to have to wait another god knows how long for MS to send the thing, and being a Linux user $150 seems a little steep for any operating system, much less a stripped down version.

Thanks for the advice, both of you.

 

Vista takes about 49% of your RAM at 2GB, and 75% at 1GB. If you have a shared graphic memory (turbocache, hypermemory), it will be difficult for games to be played. By comparison, XP takes at most 20% of RAM.

 

I believe Vista takes so much RAM because of SuperFetch - the RAM isn't technically being used in the traditional sense of the word. Vista is just reserving it for commonly used applications. It can free it up as needed dynamically.

 

It definitely is the SuperFetch. If you disable it using services.msc, you'll notice the amount of ram cached will be significantly reduced, allowing for free physical memory to increase. I prefer to leave the SuperFetch enabled for the time being.