Vista works almost perfectly with a Core 2 Duo or Pentium based Intel machine, but we decided to give it a slightly stiffer challenge. Our test system was an RD580 chipset-based Socket 939 Athlon X2 machine with a Radeon X1800 GTO video card, a Creative Audigy 2 Platinum EX sound card and an I-MON IR remote control receiver. It also has a Hauppauge WinTV HVR1100 TV card and a Belkin wifi card. Considering the driver database of Vista has been updated considerably since XP, there were still quite a few “unknown devices” within the device manager that needed our attention. Disappointingly one of these was the four year old sound card. Navigating to Creative’s website allowed us to download some Beta drivers for the Audigy that worked well enough, but only in the most basic form. The external I/O bay device is pretty much worthless with Vista, and we have no way of accessing the important SPDIF settings.
Gaming and software compatibility
Graphics drivers from ATi are now finally out of the BETA stage, allowing the usual range of Catalyst Control Center options. Windows Update was able to find drivers for the TV card, and we were able to get the Belkin wireless network card to work with XP drivers, though it didn’t seem to work as quickly as it did over XP for some reason. The same was not true for our Epson printer / scanner, which did not work at all under Vista. For the most part, Vista worked fine on our setup, but we did encounter huge problems when awakening the system from a sleep state. It would seemingly power down into the hybrid hibernation state, and start up, but upon restarting the hard drive activity light remained solidly on, even though the drives were not initializing. The only cure was to hit the reset button. Annoyingly we also had issues during startup, whereby the system would hang every second time. Restarting after this hang always allowed Vista to boot, but it’s certainly not an error I would be prepared to put up with – especially considering the machine runs perfectly on XP.
Program compatibility is surprisingly good for Vista 32 bit, with most programs installing and running fine without any tweaks, and most others running in XP compatibility mode. Exceptions to this rule include some CD writing software (Nero did not work prior to an update) and AntiVirus software – AVG which worked perfectly on RC2 now shows a Kernel error after each restart. Newer games seem to work well enough – albeit slower than XP for the most part – though we had much less luck with older releases. This is always the case when upgrading to a new OS, so give the developers time to release some patches before upgrading if you are a retro gamer. If you are a gamer and are trying to weigh up whether the extra performance potential of 64 bit windows is a worthwhile gamble, we wholeheartedly recommend you stick to 32 bit for the time being – many of the games we installed refused to run correctly under 64 bit, even using compatibility modes, and in any case the drivers for 64 bit seem less mature – we lost 2000 3DMarks when comparing 64 bit to 32 bit windows.
Video codec support in Vista is simply appalling, with Media Center crashing immediately if I had the brazen arrogance to assume DivX support might have been added by default given its popularity. Nope, even with the latest distribution of DivX installed, Vista media center crashes within 30 seconds of browsing any folder with a DivX movie in it. Whilst the movies do play in the normal dektop environment, they do so very poorly, with enough dropped frames over the course of a normal sized TV show to make it unwatchable to anyone even remotely interested in movies or TV shows. Whilst this bug will probably be fixed shortly we were terribly disappointed by the inconvenience. Given that the Beta has been out for literally months, to think that a problem of this magnitude and mainstream appeal exists in the final copy defies belief.
