Games and Vista?

Since one month I have my new Notebook now. I bought especially an Alienware book with high gameplay features and of course... Vista. It's the horror, nothing of my old external hardware components is working, neither my external 5.1. Sound System nor my Gamepads/ Joysticks. Old Doom 3 is running but my favorite Sturmovik isn't... Patches and device drivers aren't available for everything. What's that BS Microsoft, fuck? And now they annonce even Windows7...
Does that shit happen to you all the time?

Now I'm thinking about throwing out crappy Vista and install XP again, or run both system on my book for the sake of playing my old games.
What are your experiences so far?

Games and vista. Two words never before mentioned in the same scentence.
Firstly the only games that are supposed to be guarenteed to work on vista (but don't anyway) are games for windows games. Everything else was designed for XP and its up to the developer if they want to spend the time and money to patch it to an OS that is not as popular as XP.

There are rumors that M$ will be releasing a new OS soon. I would guess that its because vista is fairly unpopular (and rightly so, it may be technically great, but IMO the interface designer needs to be shot in the face).

Its up to you if you want to reinstall XP, I have a desktop that I use for everything running XP ('cos I know ut works and I'm not interested in DX10), a laptop on XP (for portability) and a laptop on Vista home premium to experiment with.
The only real advantage (for gamers) that vista has over XP is DX10 (god knows why they can't release it for XP) which not many games use yet. So if you don't have a DX10 card or you are not interested in it, I'd go with XP.

Its up to you though.

Actually you put all the three things that shouldn't be together:
Notebook + Gaming + vista..
Vista works great for gamming, its not MS fault if any hardware you bought the developers didn't upgrade to comply with the new os.

Get used to it, XP WILL DIE!
If you want to even think on having a good game rig machine, you HAVE to use either Vista or Server2008.

Simply put windows xp has hardware limitation, dx10 won't work descent on it.
Why can't you put a ferrari motor on a bettle? Kinda like that.. the amount of modification necessary for it to work, would be far too great, its alot easy just to jump to a new generation OS.

We've been doing this for a while now.. from windows 1 to xp now to vista.
Installing XP will most likely cripple your system.
As for ex. XP You can't have more then 4gb memory, and 2gb for virtual space applications.

Try running your game under all options of the Compability tab.
Windows Vista Help: Make older programs run in this version of Windows

Also mind that if you "reformat" into xp, you have the risk of many of the notebook hardware not have xp drivers..
So, instead it, all I sugest is: Dual boot xp/vista.. create a new partition and install xp on it.. if everything works as intended, then sure go ahead and full format into xp if you want to.. but if things go wrong.. you still can boot on vista to fix things

Unfortunately I feel that you wasted money, as you could build a far better computer with less money, and even buy a descent notebook with xp on it, so you'd have a game rig with vista, and a xp notebook.. for about just the same you paid on the "alienware"

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As for ex. XP You can't have more then 4gb memory, and 2gb for virtual space applications.

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Isn't there a 64bit version of windows xp, or is that limited to 4gbs too?

Windows 64bits <> windows X64

The 64bits was designed for Intel Itanium

Windows x64 on the other hand does support more ram (128gb to be exact), but it comes with a family of problem of their own:
- Driver compatibility; Only 64-bit drivers, which some hardware companies haven't written for their products, are supported.
- no support for 32extentions, so any 32-bit dll will fail to load.
- 16bits program will not run AT ALL
and a bunch of other little things.

Since the OP had specifically problem with drivers, installing x64 will not solve his problem at all..

Been using Vista for more than a year here.
No problems with the games I play.

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Originally Posted by Jyuu

Been using Vista for more than a year here.
No problems with the games I play.

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What version have you been using this whole time? Have you upgrade anything since then?

When I first started using Vista x64, I had so many problems that I reinstalled XP again for about half a year. The problem wasn't Vista itself, the problem was that hardware vendors didn't provide decent drivers for Vista or for 64-bit operating systems. I was unlucky enough to meet both of those requirements for disaster...

I reinstalled Vista x64 again recently though, and everything is running smoooooooth. I'm actually getting better game performance using the same settings as I did in XP. Crysis jumped from ~25fps to ~40fps on high settings. I later installed SP1, but noticed absolutely no improvement in gaming. It's pretty much just for improving networking compatibility and HDD performance issues.

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Originally Posted by FantasyStrike

What version have you been using this whole time? Have you upgrade anything since then?

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I'm pretty sure he's using Vista Ultimate x86 (32-bit), but I'm using Vista Ultimate x64 with no problems.

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Originally Posted by MadDogMike

I reinstalled Vista x64 again recently though, and everything is running smoooooooth. I'm actually getting better game performance using the same settings as I did in XP. Crysis jumped from ~25fps to ~40fps on high settings. I later installed SP1, but noticed absolutely no improvement in gaming. It's pretty much just for improving networking compatibility and HDD performance issues.

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Actually, I was reading about SP1 (can't remember the site) and Crysis was the one game where performance stayed the same or dropped after the patch.

I read that Crysis' framerate improved by a negligible amount, and other games stayed the same.

bit-tech.net | Windows Vista SP1 Gaming Performance

DX9 mode had negligible decreases in average framerate, while DX10 mode had negligible increases. Basically, SP1 does nothing for or against gaming performance. That's not what SP1 was aimed at anyway.