Does this game not work well for Vista with anyone else but me

[Budwise]

On Windows 2000, this game worked fine and ran very well. After upgrading to Windows Vista it runs like crap, any ideas why.

My mistake, my system is

1gb ddr Ram
AMD Athlon 3000+ cpu
320 gb Hard Drive
Windows Vista
Nvidia 6200 Geforce

[sbroadbent]

On Windows 2000, this game worked fine and ran very well. After upgrading to Windows Vista it runs like crap, any ideas why.

First question would be what Video card do you have. If it's Nvidia, that would be the problem, until they come out with some better Vista drivers.

Unless you provide some specific information about your system, all we can do is make guesses.

[Foz]

Well, for starters it wasn't designed for Vista, which may mean the game is running in some kind of compatibility mode - these never help a game to run well compared to the actual native OS that is being emulated.

Second, Vista is brand new. A new OS often means you get a lot of behavior that is just a little off, especially as companies try to make their graphical and audio solutions work flawlessly with the new platform. So while it'll say it supports everything under the sun, it often takes a little while and several driver versions before things really begin to work as well as they used to with the old OS.

Third, Vista is probably not completely optimized yet. You don't think MS has been issuing all the XP hotfixes for fun, do you? An OS is always a work in progress, so what you're noticing may simply be that Vista has not been sufficiently patched yet to work smoothly and quickly.

After numerous sad upgrade experiences, I've determined a rule: You don't want anything to do with a Microsoft operating system until it gets its first service pack. That seems to be roughly the point where it becomes more useful than nuisance, and where most things you try to do will actually work correctly. While they seem to be making some little progress in this area, I severely doubt that Vista will break form significantly and really be ready prior to SP1.

So for the moment I plan not to look at Vista until it has a service pack out, and frankly haven't heard any glowing reviews yet either that would make me reconsider that viewpoint...

[pike master]

takes up 333 megabytes of ram too!

[Forward Observer]

There is a theory that so far, every other main stream Windows operating system has been decent and the ones in between have not.

Windows 98 was better than 95 of course. Then you had WindowsME, which most people still agree was a large lump of digital crap. Next comes XP, which is based on 2000, and has been Mircosoft's best and most stable system yet.

Based on this every other system theory, Vista may just be a turkey.

Only time will tell.

[Budwise]

Yeah, I bought ME to just to be annoyed too. I think on Partition 2 of my hard drive, I will reinstall win2000 and play from that OS.

[JCoyote]

Well it does get really gray on how you consider a "mainstream" OS. Windows 2000 was probably overall the best yet; it did everything an OS fundamentally needs to without the excess baggage of XP and I used it on home and business systems. Still do. If I wanted a nice reliable system that's limited to a 32 bit proc, I'd still go 2000 over XP. And it was pretty mainstreamed... especially after ME turned out to be released later and was far worse for the extra effort. There was a period where they "forgot" ME and 2000 came on everything.

I use XP x64. It's not "mainstream", but the compatibility modes should be largely similar to a 64 bit install of Vista. I have no problems at all. That might not change for a while for me either, not much about Vista makes me feel like I just gotta have it. But I go for simple, reliable, compatible, over aesthetics and gee whiz features. Anyway, I believe Vista uses the same WoW64 engine so it shouldn't be giving you troubles unless there is a conflict coming from elsewhere.

You might have a bad graphics card. 6200's are chosen from GPU's that have bad pipelines that get "locked out". Your card could be a very marginal version of the 6200 then. Also, low graphics ram could be a problem. The rest of your system should be ok.

[Whacker]

After numerous sad upgrade experiences, I've determined a rule: You don't want anything to do with a Microsoft operating system until it gets its first service pack. That seems to be roughly the point where it becomes more useful than nuisance, and where most things you try to do will actually work correctly. While they seem to be making some little progress in this area, I severely doubt that Vista will break form significantly and really be ready prior to SP1.

Them's words to live by, both at home AND in the workplace. This is also why you're seeing Vista flounder quite a bit at it's release, because businesses do not want to adopt a brand new platform like this with a ton of known problems. Historically Foz is absolutely correct about MS platforms, with the exception of WinNT 4.0 which didn't really become useful until Service Pack 3, and Win95 which just stank no matter what.

I've also read that a number of Vista gaming benchmark tests run pre- and post-Nvidia WHQL drivers showed a general 15-30% slowness compared to running stock WinXP 32bit. The short lesson here is if you're a gamer, don't be an early adopter (this even applies somewhat to new hardware as well, in terms of buggy silicon and drivers) at an OS level. Over time I'm sure Vista will improve but as Foz pointed out, that's going to be a good while.

Good luck!

[Budwise]

Its not so much that I wanted to be the early adopter as it seems. My dad sent me a 320 gb hard drive and it just won't install windows 2000 on it at all. I had to go out and buy Vista to change that. Something that Win2000 hates it HDs that are bigger than 128gb and thats that. I already sold my last hard drive so using my new HD as a backup won't work either, the other hd would have failed soon anyways. Lets just say if it was a car, it would have had 200,000 miles on it as I am always downloading for years and years.

This is the fourth time Nvidia screwed its customers, I think I will buy an ati card next time.

[JCoyote]

You can fix that HD issue with Widows 2000 FYI, I have done it before. I only had to abandon 2000 because my CD got damaged.

However, if you go to the right places, you could get a copy of XP x64 Edition which is probably the best Windows out there right now. It's fundamentally a variation of Server 2003, so it lacks a lot of the release issues of other versions.

[Foz]

You can fix that HD issue with Widows 2000 FYI, I have done it before. I only had to abandon 2000 because my CD got damaged.

However, if you go to the right places, you could get a copy of XP x64 Edition which is probably the best Windows out there right now. It's fundamentally a variation of Server 2003, so it lacks a lot of the release issues of other versions.

XP has that issue too prior to SP1. Something about the length that the OS assumes the addresses on the drive are - it might've been 24-bit and was upgraded to 32 for the larger drives, I simply can't remember the exact details. Anyway, it caused me AWFUL hard drive problems this past time I reinstalled, as I actually tried to access that drive before installing SP1. Basically, half of my huge hard drive (which was mostly full) showed up on my next scandisk check as orphaned files: apparently my attempt to write to the drive overwrote a huge chunk of the FAT for the drive, likely b/c of the OS just assuming it had 24-bit memory addresses. I had no idea of why this had happened or that the problem existed, until I read about it on a troubleshooting website

As for XP x64 edition... I've been running XP Pro forever now, but somewhere along the line I did end up upgrading to a 64 bit AMD processor. Will I notice any differences if I upgrade to x64 edition, and how much of a pain is it likely to be for me to do that at this point?