talkmagic.co.uk

the sound problem is due to vista not having the direct sound layer so alot of older sound cards and onboard ones won't work.
even creative that venerable sound maker has had a headache with vista.

most mags iv'e read say wait till next year or service pack 1 before buying because what you gain is a nice looking interface that fewts old quick and not much else till all the drivers are redone.

this weeks micro mart has a good rundown of the pitfalls and gains.

Well, I'm sorry you were tempted by 'early adopter' syndrome–I'm always guilty of that sin!

I spoke to my buddy who installed Vista, and his machine is a 2.1 core duo Intel processor, and he's running with 4Gb RAM. He uses his machine for CAD work.

Since his 'upgrade' (I say it like this cos he's now regraded back to XP) he noticed applications running slower, if at all, and most hardware wasn't recognised or functional, including his wireless keyboard, printer and scanner. Networking also caused a few headaches. But being a tecchie sort of bloke he persevered I imagine.

He even tried getting new drivers for the respective devices—which was to no avail.

It took a clean install of XP and re-installation of all his applications to get up and running again, a total of a weekend's downtime all told.

I think Vista's 'minimum hardware requirements' are a little misleading. And at the minute, it seems like installing Vista is the equivalent of a newly qualified mechanic dropping a V12 5 litre engine into a Ford Mondeo and expecting the car to function correctly.

He did say the interface was nice... but in his opinion, the overheads placed on the system by all the bells and whistles is probably part of the hold up.

In his opinion, you need pretty much a 2 year old or newer machine which is pretty hi-spec to even stand a chance.

As a Mac user—and evangelist (:D) I'd just like to say that Apple's new operating system runs like a dream—even on 7 year old Macintoshes. This is mainly due to Apple's control of their own hardware... which isolates a lot of development potential problems. Mac machines are built by Apple to their own specs, and therefore their operating system can be more predictible during the development.

On the other hand, a PC is basically a Frankensteins' monster of various components. When buying a PC, usually the spec sounds great—good processor, nice case, fast DVD writer, free printer etc. But these packages skimp on essentials which you DON'T see, like the motherboard and the graphics & sound drivers.

Buyer beware.

It's sad really, as the PC community has waited a long time for Vista. And early adopters of the new OS may just find themselves either struggling to cope with it or ditching it altogether.

Rather than start a thread about my question I thought it'd be better to place it in here.

Does anyone know of 64 bit AV's that work with Vista? I have a vista disc with 32 and 64 bit on but I have not installed because my AV of choice (ZONE LABS INTERNET SECURITY SUITE) does not support 64 bit vista.

As I am running a 64 bit processor I do not really want to swap OS's until I can fully utilise the 64 bit capabilities.

(BTW, I was registered as a beta tester for Vista hence why I got a disc with 32 and 64 bit on but I never got round to installing)

You get a 32 and a 64 bit disc in the pack but I don't know about the drivers. My processor is the Athlon 64 3200+ and I was assuming that the 64 meant 64 bit? However, the 64 bit version wouldn't load and it reported that it wasn't compatible.

Anyway - after much seraching, and I mean MUCH I managed to find an XP driver hidden on the HP web site for the wireless card. As soon as I loaded this it fired into action and then automatically downloaded the drivers for the sound card.

ALL is now working well to my amazement and I'm having a good play around before loading any apps. So far it's just as fast as XP was.

Does anyone know how to get rid of a boot menu?

dat8962 wrote:You get a 32 and a 64 bit disc in the pack but I don't know about the drivers. My processor is the Athlon 64 3200+ and I was assuming that the 64 meant 64 bit? However, the 64 bit version wouldn't load and it reported that it wasn't compatible.

Anyway - after much seraching, and I mean MUCH I managed to find an XP driver hidden on the HP web site for the wireless card. As soon as I loaded this it fired into action and then automatically downloaded the drivers for the sound card.

ALL is now working well to my amazement and I'm having a good play around before loading any apps. So far it's just as fast as XP was.

Does anyone know how to get rid of a boot menu?

Good to hear your getting somewhere with it. Yes, any Athlon 64 IS a 64 bit processor. If it says it is incompatible with a 64bit OS, its more likely to be another piece of hardware that is the problem.

Could I ask what is on your boot menu as of now? It can be pretty dangerous to just guess when making changes to a boot menu. If the real problem is that it takes to long to automatically select an OS, try this..
In Vista:
Control Panel > System > Advanced tab > Startup and recovery settings > change the ''time to list operating systems'' setting. Put it down to 1-3 second/s or something.

Theres an option to change the default OS aswell.

the boot menu gives three options which are:

1. load old windows (assuming that this is XP that I installed over as it's an upgrade version of Vista)
2. Load Vista
3. Load Vista safe mode.

I'll play around with the settings now that I know where to look.

It doesn't appear to like multi-tasking if one of the tasks is installing a download

Right. Having been commissioned to write a piece about the security features in Vista, I bit the bullet and got the local shop to slap together the necessary hardware over the weekend and I loaded Vista Ultimate onto it yesterday. It looks very nice, I must say, but it's going to frustrate a lot of people just by the fact that it's so different. I haven't tried any tricky hardware yet, though. Not even a USB pen.

The chess program is rather nice, I must say. I'm only a very occasional player, but I've beaten it 3 out of three times on the lowest setting. Mind you, the whole system froze on me during one match and wouldn't melt again, so it should have been 4-nil.

Oh, and the task bar's autohide setting keeps turning itself off again. Grrr...

It's really nice to hear how people 'love' the look of Vista—with all it's new bells and whistles, like 3D chess.

If you'd have bought an Apple Mac 3 or more years ago, you could have had the same, but nicer, experience, as we've had all of this for years.

Oh, and the Mac OS works. Full stop

I agree with Tomo in that Vista will frustrate a lot of upgraders who don't know their way around a PC.

Other than this, I've now been running Vista since I wrote this post which is coming up for a month and overall I'm now very pleased. Having got over the initial driver problems and the disapointment that my Logitech 4000 Pro web cam isn't supported, I've now got everything else running fine and without problems. This includes bluetooth, IR, WinTV and a variety of external USB drives.

Other than re-booting the PC for downloads it's not been switched off for the past fortnight and it's not yet crashed (tempting fate here) which is a first for windows.

Slightly disapointed that OneCare doesn;t fully integrate with Vista's security centre but again, if you know what you're doing you can turn off the carious in-built features to stop the annoying alerts. Technical support at Microsoft were pretty quick with their response on this one.

I'd now recommend getting Vista if your PC is up to it but if you're not at least skilled in basic software configuration then pay someone to install the upgrade for you.

The thing that gets me is that when you click on something and there's to be a delay of a few seconds, the mouse pointer doesn't change to a timer. I've been caught out a few times like that now.