What's a reviewer to do?

[Nick]

Vista... bane of my bloody life.

I'm so sick and tired of installing so called 'Games For Windows' games to review and then spanking an hour or so updating, patching and hotfixing either the game or Vista to be rewarded with a clunky playing experience that I know is ten times smoother under XP than Vista.

I wouldn't mind all the supposed DX10 bells and whistles worked or the game auto-updated or if Vista just was even mildly sensible and configured itself for the game I want to run but all of that is too much to sodding ask.

So whilst developers, hardware companies and Microsoft all argue about who's fault it is that nothing bloody works, I'm left sitting here looking at yet another crashed game or download progress bar...

And in the several tests I've carried out so far, I get none of these headaches under XP...

Vista gaming? Yeah, sure, if you want to stick to Minesweeper and Solitaire...

Peace out.

[Ferral]

Whole framerate dropping down and getting the display driver not working error message bugs me out all the time. After it has done it a few times on the same game it causes the system to completely crash and I have to hard reset the machine.

Feel for you with that one!

[TiG]

I've suffered another nasty Vista situation where i've installed a new set of drives on my dad's machine, left the other raid array in place and changed the boot os partition.

Plug old drives back in and vista comes up with access denied access to them....

UAC has denied access to the original drive!?!.

Its the main complaint i've had recently, where i've wanted to do somethign relatively simple conceptually, Vista really has put a few curve balls in.

Another one?, Try printing to a Vista Machine running a shared printer from an XP machine when the system will refuse to allow you to install a XP printer driver to the VISTA machine so that when you go and connect to the Vista machine it will allow you to reference the XP driver.

So far found it completely impossible to overcome......

TiG

[Nick]

Yep, I had that self same printer experience, but only when I foolishly updated the printer drivers from XP to Vista versions.

Try removing the printer and uninstalling the drivers, then installing XP drivers on the Vista machine... that worked for me using a Lexmark printer though I've now switched to a Brother network capable all-in-one jobby.

[DavidM]

The odd window's game is the only thing I'm concerned about losing when I switch to Linux soon.

[0iD]

I never got Gears to work at all & CoD4 kept crapping out every time I tried to play a mp game. Up until then I had no real issues with it, apart from the whols X-Fi debacle, which was easil resolved.

[jimbouk]

Well I never forgave Steam for the mess of the HL2 release. Putting a game in a shop that requires hours of updates before you can play it when all it said was "Online activation required", tut tut.

To your question, I guess mention it in the review - tell the world how bad it is! Review scores shouldn't just be about how well it runs on a £10k rig AFTER the 4 hours of updates; tell about about the real experience so we can decide whether it's worth the hassle.

Oh and bash Vista at the start of every review so people don't buy it...

[Azza]

I canny even get my two wifi adapters to work in Vista now.

No point at all in installing any games if I canny update them.

[[GSV]Trig]

But nick, theres nothing wrong with Vista, it must be your hardware, drivers, dodgy copy thats causing the problems...



Thats the general answer I got from the forums anyways

[Zak33]

Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK
=£11.73

+

Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK
= £29.13

+

XP Home

+

Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK = £0.63

And you're done....

Put master Vista drive in Caddy for work.... pop it out, and replace it with above XP drive for gaming in Xp.

Cool or what?

I have one.....it's ace!

[Nick]

I have it as a dual boot machine anyways bud!

[Agent]

Originally Posted by Nick

Vista... bane of my bloody life.

I'm so sick and tired of installing so called 'Games For Windows' games to review and then spanking an hour or so updating, patching and hotfixing either the game or Vista to be rewarded with a clunky playing experience that I know is ten times smoother under XP than Vista.

I wouldn't mind all the supposed DX10 bells and whistles worked or the game auto-updated or if Vista just was even mildly sensible and configured itself for the game I want to run but all of that is too much to sodding ask.

So whilst developers, hardware companies and Microsoft all argue about who's fault it is that nothing bloody works, I'm left sitting here looking at yet another crashed game or download progress bar...

And in the several tests I've carried out so far, I get none of these headaches under XP...

Vista gaming? Yeah, sure, if you want to stick to Minesweeper and Solitaire...

Peace out.

Hi Nick

First, let me welcome to you HEXUS as its clear you don't "get" how things work around here....

Some poor sod will come in and make a complaint about Vista. You'll normally get a reply out of one of these five:

1) It's the drivers, don't blame poor Vista!
2) It's been fine since since SP1!
3) It must be your system, mine is fine!
4) I have installed Vista on 6 bajillion PC's and it works fine on all of them, sounds like a driver problem to me!
5) You need to update your hardware. Vista only works well on the latest hardware!

I have added the exclamation mark at the end of each sentence in an attempt to add more "ommph" to what's being said. Believe me, its less annoying than having to defend yourself from the people who constantly harp that Vista is fine and seem to take offence on people who have an opinion on such matters.
You'll normally find that the replies come from the same people too, who will then moan about people moaning about Vista. It's all very entertaining

Signed,
Love Agent

[Mattitude]

Originally Posted by Agent

Signed,
Love Agent

You're a "Love Agent"? I'm sure many of us could use some help there

.....ok then, maybe just me

Anywho, back on topic - I'd assume that the best way for it to work would be for everyone (the developers, Microsoft, hardware companies etc.) to actually work together properly instead of blaming each other.

However if that were going to happen, it'd probably have happened already.

Indeed it's clear though that you shouldn't have to go through updates etc. and especially then still end up with a substandard performance compared to how it would be on XP.

Ah well, maybe it won't be such a problem when we get to Windows 7