RogueHart Posted October 16, 2008 Posted October 16, 2008 got a new laptop from my military parents. its a gateway from bestbuy but its a tad used. works great for the most part. other than running vista. now i would love to downgrade this to xp pro like my old laptop but i dont have a legal copy and i dont want to pirate it. so im gonna have to deal with vista(gonna dual boot linux at some point for development) since i play a lot of windows based games. my problem is this. im trying to install fear combat since this rig can actually handle the game. but everytime i try to run the installer it does nothing but slow down my system. doesnt show up in task manager processes. and never loads until my computer just crashes. this isnt the only exe file that its happened to on vista and its severely pissing me off. does anyone know what to do to fix this issue?\ edit: found solution myself after "running" it in compatibility with xp sp2 and waiting literally 20 minutes it finally ran and installed. the game itself runs fine now that its installed. Quote
DingleBerries Posted October 16, 2008 Posted October 16, 2008 I had alot of problems with vista when i first adopted it, after a while i think you get use to the pitt falls. It is however alot more responsive them my last lappy, but im sure that has to do with the extra ram and processor. I found that there are loads of registry tweaks and what not out there that do increase the performance, and turning of unused services is a godsend. Quote
VaKo Posted October 16, 2008 Posted October 16, 2008 The trick with Vista/2008 is more cores and as much ram as you can get your hands on. 2GB is the bare min, 4 is ok and I noticed a big jump when I moved to 6GB. Going to go for 8GB as my machine at work has 16GB and is in a different world completely. RAM really makes a difference for vista. I do like vista tbh, its nice and XP just feels kinda old compared to it. Quote
Timmay Posted October 16, 2008 Posted October 16, 2008 Yeah, I am slowly getting used to vista. Though I would go back to XP if it ported over some of the features I use in Vista. I work with computers all day and I suddenly realized that XP and Vista both suck. XP has just grown on people so they are used to its quirks, but vista is the new kid on the block and has a whole new set of quirks. I'm sure windows 7 will be as much of a nuisance when it comes out; Quote
RogueHart Posted October 16, 2008 Author Posted October 16, 2008 i would actually like vista if it wasnt for 2 things 1: its slow at times. incredibly slow. waiting 20 minutes for an installer to start running is bullshit. 2: game compatibility. there are quite a few xp based games that will not play on vista which really pisses me off. Quote
MRGRIM Posted October 17, 2008 Posted October 17, 2008 Had an ASUS F3 Series laptop given to me by work running Vista on 1GB Then I installed Vista X64 at home on a rig with 4GB and the difference was HUGE! Reccently replaced my ASUS work laptop with a Precision running Vista with 4GB (3.5GB) Quote
vector Posted October 17, 2008 Posted October 17, 2008 wow ok. well im not sure how you guys are benchmarking your machines, but more ram does not mean instant performance increase. theres soo many other factors that impact overall system performance. 3 of my 6 laptops run vista, and none of them has more than 3 gigs of ram, even my hp mini note which has 2 gigs ddr2-800 never uses more than 65% physical memory, its usually the processor that pegs out before you top out on ram. so it dosnt make sense that going from 4gigs to 6 gigs or even 2 gigs to 3-4 gigs on a fresh install will increase performance, unless youre upgrading your actual ram, moving to higher speed lower latency ram for example, but just the simple act of throwing a couple extra gigs of ram in your box that you likely wont even use, wont take vista from super slow to blazing fast, and more cores is nice if the apps youre running are written to take advantage of multi core processors. your hardware is only as good as the apps running on it. Quote
VaKo Posted October 17, 2008 Posted October 17, 2008 I don't know what you do with your machines but I often use 95% of my systems RAM. For instance when I run 4 or 5 virtual machines (an entire windows domain with clients, routers and multiple servers) at once along with Photoshop. If your just playing games and browsing the web, then no, its probally not worth it. But if you actually do work on your machine it is. Quote
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