Vista Workshop: More RAM, More Speed

[totenkopf]

I understand peoples complaints about a this article not necessarily being objective and not showing any real data... but how did linux and leopard get brought into this?

I run Vista64 on an x38 chipset mobo with 4GB ram... The system is awesome! I would never go back to XP OR Mac. And for the last time, please stop talking about how windows gets "infections". I NEVER get any viruses because I spent 30 minutes setting up a firewall, anti virus and a couple anti spyware programs to update and run automatically... problem solved! The only BOSD's i get are when I'm playing with my overclock... try doing that on your mac pro.

People say vista 64 is bloated and doesn't run all of your apps. Well, what apps? I'm playing the freakin warcraft 2! So far the only things I have found will not run are my sandbox programs for surfing and rootkit detectors/removers, supposedly none of this is necessary with vista64? As for the bloated thing... this is 2008... spend a few hundo on a decent processor and at least 4GB of memory. the people that have problems on vista are running older machines. once true 64 bit apps are made we will all see how much faster vista is than xp.

Anyways everything runs great and pretty speedy too. My computer doesn't take 40 seconds to get the desktop though, and waking up from hibernate is almost instantaneous! However, I too would like to know if 8GB will help me or not.

to the proud mac pro owner: Get a life. no one cares that you spend $4,000 on your computer and it works real good. I spent a quarter of that and got a machine that is faster than yours... cept yours has twice the cores Oh... or can you make your quads run at 3.6ghz on a mac? It's good to see that when you bought yours you opted not to get the standard HD 2600 pro or whatever (HAHAHAHAHA). Glad to see you still need windows to have fun with your machine... i know you can run multiple instances of photoshop, so, good luck with that. Maybe with the money I saved I'll buy your special lady friend something nice the next time I see her.

 

[jflongo]

Funny they said 4GB for as little as $198.

I build a new machine 6 months ago and bought 4GB(2GB x 2) after rebate for $198.

I just ordered the exact same memory, and it's ONLY $67.99 AFTER rebate and before shipping. So I will be up to 8GB real soon.

Can you believe it these days, ONLY $67.99 after rebate for 4GB, wow.

Here is the Memory I have been using since July and it has worked flawlessly for me, that is why I'm ordering the same ones.

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220227

 

[krisia2006]

Bad in what way? Sorry but these anti-vista posts are always so damn vague. My games are smotth as butta on Vista 64 - no complaints. Same with many of us here and elsewhere. You try recently, or right after Vista shipped, because Vista today is nothing like when it shipped.

I'm comparing vista64 vs xp 32bit, fully patched with latest drivers last week, LOL.
For the games I play, it is not even close.
And I'm talking about a E8400, with a 8800GT. Not exactly low spec??? So, "your machine sucks" guy would be ... wrong...

 

[Christopher1]

I have to say one thing on this article: if your computer is not allowing you to totally delete the page file (I did it on my parents 2.5GB computer).... you have a virus or some other problem.

You should also be able to delete the hibernation file (which takes up quite a bit of space). I did that on my system when I first bought it, re-enabled it because I needed to keep stuff in memory after I turned off my computer.... and now I cannot delete it, Windows tells me that the Hibernation file is being 'used' when I have used that powercfg command to disable hibernation.... another problem is that when I am doing a boottime defrag with PerfectDisk, it finds TWO hibernation files, which doesn't make any sense in the slightest.

 

[notherdude]

Funny they said 4GB for as little as $198.

I build a new machine 6 months ago and bought 4GB(2GB x 2) after rebate for $198.

I just ordered the exact same memory, and it's ONLY $67.99 AFTER rebate and before shipping. So I will be up to 8GB real soon.

Can you believe it these days, ONLY $67.99 after rebate for 4GB, wow.

Here is the Memory I have been using since July and it has worked flawlessly for me, that is why I'm ordering the same ones.

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220227

Just bought my second set of that same Patriot 2 x 2 this afternoon! This article sparked my interest. Now I got 4 gigs of perfectly good Super Talent PC 800 (4 x 1) just gathering dust.

 

[Mach5Motorsport]

Crom, isn't a Mac just an expensive Intel machine? Yeah. I thought so LOL

 

[Mach5Motorsport]

Notherdude wrote:

Nobody is twisting your arm to upgrade. But when you do you will have this option. 64 is no nirvana. What you got is fine and dandy. It's just another option. Sheesh

Sheesh, I've never seen such effort to hype Vista and now the effort to hype Vista 64-bit OS.

Just keep throwing $$$$ at it and it eventually will run as fast as XP Pro. LOL

 

[notherdude]

Don't know what you mean by hype. In the article? I didn't see any hype. And in the tech press in general Vista is getting reverse hype - it's getting accused of being much worse than it is.

 

[band]

They need to provide benchmarks, no doubt. They also need to include ReadyBoost benchmarks, which they didn't even mention. I installed ReadyBoost on a USB Memory stick 4GB and noticed improved performance starting big apps like loading games and whatnot..


Windows Xp has supported 64bit since the first 64bit athlon came out.

I have run Vista 32 and 64 since day one of release. I honestly don't see why peeps are complaining about upgrading to vista and saying XP is better lalala.... It's was the same with windows XP when it first came out, whining "windows 98 is better!" boohoo, are they still running 98? doubt it. Just adapt people.

I dig vista, i think we are way passed do for some native 64 bit apps. We have had 64 bit hardware and software for 6 years now. Shame on lame developers.

 

[StevieD]

Attention Mac People. The Airpoo. (take the tour, you'll be sorry)

http://www.airpoo.com/

I sure liked a heated seat when I visited my relatives way up in the frozen tundra. I am sure glad he airpoo will have a heated seat as standard equipment.

 

[badge]

At 52 anything with heat looks good to me.

 

[ir_efrem]

How bout some plain ole numbers....

I would post some links about Vista vrs (Any other OS), but those who know already understand, know that Vista is slower than... well pretty much everything.

I would not mind some numbers comparing an OS with certain memory amounts - note to Toms, how bout an OS/Memory chart perhaps? Some folks look at yur current charts to decide what CPU and Video card to buy. Perhaps some of us would like to make an OS and Memory purchase based on performance. At the least it would answer some questions that we are curious about.

 

[randomizer]

Yes, the article failed to point out that 'Upgrade' versions of Vista are considered retail, and therefore they also apply for the Microsoft 64-bit alternate media deal (at approx. half the price of full retail). IMHO, that's the way to go. I purchased Vista Premium Upgrade 32-bit at Costco for $140 then paid Microsoft $10 for a 64-bit version for a total of $150.

You answered my question, I was going to ask about that as I never pay for the full retail versions. Upgrade FTW!

 

[curaga]

Curaga put this to good use.

Thanks for the link, but I'm not running windows, I don't get memory fragmentation due to the smarter allocator. Same with my HD, ext3's allocator practically prevents fragmentation, I have used the same HD for about 6 years, and my total fragmentation is 2%.

@totenkopf:
what apps you say. Read and then ask again. They tested 4 games, 3 current and 1 dos game with dosbox. Each of the current games either hung or crashed Vista (32bits btw). Dosbox only hang itself. None was playable even after latest patches.

 

[randomizer]

BF2 works fine now, don't know about Civ 4 or baldur's gate. They should have fixed up PB manually.

There is absolutely no reason for anything but drivers written by a retarded monkey to take down any operating system.

Ok, now he's blaming drivers. Well I'm willing to bet it's nvidia's drivers that are to blame. Considering the most recent drivers for the FX series are from 2006

 

[curaga]

Outside of games, I haven't been able to get a Vista-certified 3G dongle work, nor an accounting software for XP (Passeli Professional)

 

[curaga]

Shame on lame developers.

I just think this is funny, considering lame has been 64-bit for years also

 

[randomizer]

I have only had problems with programs needing digitally signed drivers on vista x64, and I never used vista x86. I still prefer XP though, I like the cleaner, less eye-candied GUI.

 

[ap90033]

Why would anyone want to shell out almost 600 bucks on Windows "Ultimate"?

If you want to take real advantage of 8 gigs of memory do the following:

1. Install Ubuntu 64 bit edition. Then install Wine sucks and try to run your Windows applications that way. You can keep Vista on there if you'd like, and dual boot the system.

2. Buy a Mac. Leopard fully supports 64 bit software applications, and has a much better 32 bit emulation built into it.

It's good to see Microsoft finally coming to the 64 bit bandwagon, it's sure taken them long enough. However with the driver issues alone, that makes that 300 - 500 dollars you're shelling out for an OS that may or may not run your programs very expensive.

Linux= next to no games

Mac = Stupidly expensive pricing
Ultimate can be had for LESS than 200$...
You arent trying to spread some FUD are you....

 

[Magumi]

You should also be able Windows tells me that the Hibernation file is being 'used' when I have used that powercfg command to disable hibernation.... another problem is that when I am doing a boottime defrag with PerfectDisk, it finds TWO hibernation files, which doesn't make any sense in the slightest.

I think the problem is that Vista uses a so-called hybrid sleep as a default, which is sleep combined with hibernation. I believe this is why Vista takes longer to sleep than XP and why it always builds the hibernation.sys file, unless you turn it off. The reason for this is that in the case of power cut, Vista uses the image of your memory on the hard drive (belt and buckles) and you don't lose any unsaved date and your applications open as they would from normal sleep. So in your case, I would venture to guess that after you deleted the hibernation file and then re-enabled it again, Vista built one hibernation file for "true" hibernation and one for hybrid sleep.

But I could be completely wrong, off course, this is just speculation.

 

[Magumi]

BTW, I am one of those people who have Vista x64 with 8 RAM and quad-core Intel chip, and my Vista also works very fast and very smoothly.

When I bought the box from my OEM, it was very slow, though, and I was very disappointed, because I chose my hardware carefully to work with Vista. I updated the whole machine with no luck. In the end, it was BIOS re-flash, which helped, and the difference was like between night and day. However, when I thought about it later, I discovered that the problem was caused by wrong BIOS settings, so it was the OEM's mistake and that it had nothing to do with Vista or the hardware.

I had two errors with Vista over the past six months or so. One was a BSOD caused by excessive overclocking. The other error was that I could not get into a Device Manager, which was caused by my tinkering with Vista, but I managed to repair that. And that's it. Speaking of tinkering, in the end I found out that it is best to leave Vista to its own devices (unlike XP), which is a good thing.

Speaking of performance and hardware requirements, when I compare my current Vista computer with a PC that I bought for then-new Windows XP (which cost more), I must say that Vista has an upper hand both in how fast the applications run and in how comfortable it is to use and how stable it is. At the same time, the difference between DOS and Windows 3.11, Windows 3.11 and Windows 98 and Windows 98 and Windows XP, was in all cases much bigger than the difference between a finely tuned Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista.

 

[marvelous211]

What was the point of the article? It doesn't tell us anything.

 

[tjhva]

Interesting that Tom's has ignored this article thus far.

 

[randomizer]

Not really, that is what usually happens. It's only the game reviews that get responded to.

 

[what2be]

First off, im glad from reading some of the previous posts that you can agree this website is going down the tubes faster than Brittany spears career. Its quite apparant from all the ads plastered here that Toms has sold out and is more concerned about the almighty dollar than doing real benchmark testing. I guess the article I read a few years back about Tom threating to sue the guy that took a picture of him while he was drunk at comdex should have woke me up then to what a pompous ass he is and it sounds like the rest of the reviewers are right behind him. (if the previous posters post was any indication).

Where are the benchmarks? Geez, i guess were just supposed to take his word for it. I mean, he wouldnt lie to us would he?

Whats up with the quote about how amd chips dont need the memory hole mapped in the bios? Thats funny, because on my supermicro dual opteron board with 2 dual core 285's , I had to enable memory hole before it saw all 8 gigs of my ram. Other than that, it was 3 gigs.

Also, where is the native 64 bit photoshop? Do they even offer it to do a benchmark? What about benchmarking photoshop 32 bit with 4 and 8 gigs as well with x32 and x64?

Oh, and dont let me forget to add about their raid controller card roundup. Funny how they mention to buy the ICP 5085BL card over the adaptec because they are supposedly the exact same card and price, yet the ICP has a faster processor (it does) but what they FAILED to tell us is that if you buy the ICP card in the USA ADAPTEC USA WILL NOT SUPPORT IT. You have to contact Adaptec European, where the ICP card is sold. Nice job again toms! You the man!