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?

[Bob the Insane]

I run it on Vista myself and it all seems to work just as well as it did on the same machine when it was XP (before I upgraded it)...

The machine is pretty beefy with 2GB of RAM so maybe the OP is just suffering from Vista's larger footprint..

[JCoyote]

If you have XP Pro you are probably pretty well covered. The only real advantage I could see for you would be better forward compatibility with 64 bit programs. I bought it because I had to replace my 2000 disc and the choice was between Pro and x64. I went with the newer because I had the hardware to.

But I don't think, if I already had Pro, that I would have bothered upgrading to x64. Vista will mean more 64 bit programs out there, and x64 should run most of them so that's the only real advantage. DX10 might be the only issue there... I'm not under the impression they'll release it for x64 which does suck. But there isn't a fundamental programming issue to block them from doing so... maybe we'll get lucky there.

I don't know if you still can, but there was something like a 4 month trial edition of x64 you can download and run for free. It was full featured and would definitely tell you if there would be any advantage and if you'd want to buy it.

The trick with installing the earlier OS on the larger drives is installing them on a small partition the OS can handle, then upgrading the OS to the newer service pack IMMEDIATELY without running ANY disk scans or fixes on it. After the OS is patched, then you can go about working on and resizing your disk. You might get stuck with 2 partitions but... meh. You'll still have the space. But DO NOT create that extra partition until the OS is installed AND upgraded.

[Whacker]

Foz, I could be wrong but I *think* the HDD size issue was fixed in SP2, not SP1. /shrug I'm positive it's also been fixed for Win2k in an service pack (think it was 3) but I honestly don't know which one.

Budwise(r), if you want to reinstall Win2k, there are methods for creating your own service-packed installation discs using the latest service pack from MS, your original Win2k installation disc, and a tool. It'll create an image for you that you can just burn to CD and install fresh. The latest WinXP install CDs that come pre-patched with SP2 don't have the HDD size problem. I don't have the links handy and this is a pretty advanced topic, so if you aren't technically inclined or don't have access to someone who is, I wouldn't advise tackling this. Of course this assumes that my sometimes bad memory isn't wrong and Win2k really did have the HDD size fix in one of the latest service packs... if not then I guess all that is moot. Worst case you could reinstall then get a free partition resizer, or shell out some bucks for one of the commercial ones. This way is very risky, make sure you always back up your important stuff before trying anything. Best of luck whichever way you go.

[sbroadbent]

Foz, I could be wrong but I *think* the HDD size issue was fixed in SP2, not SP1. /shrug I'm positive it's also been fixed for Win2k in an service pack (think it was 3) but I honestly don't know which one.

It is SP1 that fixed the hard drive size issue. In this case, the best thing to do is to obtain a copy of XP with SP1, or create a new windows cd with the necessary service packs as mentioned.

As to x64, it can access more memory (above 3.2 GB), and handle larger hard drive partitions (upwards of 4 terrabytes if I'm not mistaken). Performance wise you may not notice much of a difference with 32 bit apps, but I think there are differences for apps that are optimized for 64 bit.

[holycow]

looking at your system stats, I'd guess it's your 1gig ram, I'm in the process of building my own system for vista and I'm putting in 4gig ram.

[Whacker]

Performance wise you may not notice much of a difference with 32 bit apps, but I think there are differences for apps that are optimized for 64 bit.

The performance difference on the 64-bit version is negligible in most games, in orders of 5% or less in most cases. There was a special patch released for Chronicles of Riddick that I think gave it a 3% increase in speed on the 64-bit version of windows.

Vista on the other hand is the pits, I don't have the article handy but there have been benchmarks done post-WHQL on Nvidia cards that are in the orders of 10-40% slower than straight 32bit WinXP. This and all the other negative vibe I'm getting from reading about Vista only cements my position on waiting a good while before getting it myself.

Agree w/you though, it would be very cool to see some x86-64 optimized versions of the TW exe(s) available down the road that offer some real performance increases.

[Foz]

Just wanted to confirm that yes you can in fact create new windows install discs that include any amount of patches and service packs. The official term for doing so is called slipstreaming, IIRC. Basically, the process involves unpacking the install CD onto the hard drive, then patching the files with the various patches you want included. It's largely like installing the updates to windows normally, except you're installing them to the disc info on the HD, and I'd imagine without the cushy GUI. Then it's a matter of packing all that stuff back up into a windows install disc again, which then brings with it the benefits of all those updates and patches.

As I recall it's not actually as hard to do as one would think, and the frustration it saves you when you have to reinstall (it seems unavoidable, ya know? Blowing up and recreating your OS is still the best medicine for a MS OS) is well worth the trouble.

[Whacker]

Aye, the yearly low-level-reformat-and-reinstall has become a ritual for some of us. The only thing I wanted to add is that to some of us creating a slipstreamed install CD isn't hard at all, someone who's not technically inclined could get way over their heads quite quickly. I guess I just wanted to say be cautious. all ur base r belong 2 fdisk lol!!!111oneone

[JCoyote]

Well speed isn't precisely the advantage of going 64 bits, it's more akin to horsepower. Most of us just don't use any programs that require the processing advantages 64 bit gives... Lord knows I haven't been doing any decryption work lately or genome decoding. Memory addressing IS an issue, but only if you need more than 4 gigs of RAM.

However, I will make one comment here... I do think my x64 Edition is better when it comes to multi-tasking because it can store massive amounts in virtual RAM on the disk. Hence, I can shuffle very large programs into the background without hurting my performance. So I always play M2TW with lots of other stuff running. Having a dual core proc helps with this too though.

BTW, 3.2 Tera is nowhere near the actual limits of 64 bit addressing, it's just a current and slightly artificial limit in procs and OS's. The upper limit is actually around 18,000,000,000GB (that's 18 million terabytes) but hardware doesn't address that much (yet). But the OS's actually use far less than even the limits of the procs out there. There isn't any REASON for them to, it's no harder or more performance consuming for the OS to open up all the RAM possible. It's simply marketing... they want to save something else to make us pay for later.

But like I said, I could have just as easily gotten Pro and been mostly as happy. I just wanted the most advanced thing out at that moment, and it turned out to be a great, well developed OS.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

In regards to slipstreaming, I have been using this technique for a very long time and could not imagine not using it. Its very convenient and easy to do. You definately don't need to be an IT administrator but some computer knowledge (especially dos) is good. Do a google search to find a step by step how to do it.

It also works for other programs eg office 2000 or whatever other version you use.

Tip XP pro slipstreamed does not fit on a CD so you will need to use a DVD which will auto-boot just fine.


Edit: You can avoid the hard drive size limitation by using an ME boot disc and partitoning it using Fdisk. Easy

[JCoyote]

ME boot discs don't do 48bit LBA.

[Nebuchadnezzar]

That will depend on the bios on your MB. You would need a pretty old board for it not to work. Fdisk and Partion to drives of 137GB or less using %'s not bytes (sometimes it shows wrong size but all will be OK) to then format to Fat32 if you want. Windows CD will reformat to NTFS.

Try not to convert to NTFS after OS installed as sector size will be less efficient.

[dumas]

I played with Longhorn and things may be different now, but unless things drastically changed:

Turn Aero off.

Like they tell you, 1gb ram and 128 memory bus can run Aero--but not much else.

[Budwise]

Cancel that, because of my 320 gb hard drive split up into three partitions, I tried and failed to install win2000 on partition 2. Well, after installing Vista again, everything works fine now. I had to download newer beta drivers for my sound card and graphics card but everything works fine now.

[JCoyote]

Cancel that, because of my 320 gb hard drive split up into three partitions, I tried and failed to install win2000 on partition 2. Well, after installing Vista again, everything works fine now. I had to download newer beta drivers for my sound card and graphics card but everything works fine now.

There you go, if that wasn't a properly slipstreamed disc, you could have really messed up your system. To successfully install on a HD that's over 137 GB, there can only be ONE partition on the drive when you do it, and it must be at the front of the drive, and it must be smaller than 137 GB.

[Temujin]

looking at your system stats, I'd guess it's your 1gig ram

Seconded.

Upgrading from 1 to 2 gb of RAM had a MASSIVE effect on my machine's performance, especially in games. Not only does everything now run smoothly, but it eliminated a lot of "funny" bugs that would occur from time to time, including a couple of MTWII CTD's that were probably out-of-memory related.

After upgrading RAM, I installed Vista (ultimate ed.), and in my opinion this has just further improved gaming performance on my machine. Whether this is due to improvements in the OS or simply the cleaning effect of a re-install I can't say, but I can now task-switch in and out of games that would previously crash when I tried that, and this has to be due to improvements in Vista.

One warning, though: I've heard of severe performance problems from people who went the "upgrade" instead of "re-install" route with Vista. If your hardware is up to snuff but Vista seems to stutter anyway, maybe that's the issue?

[sbroadbent]

One warning, though: I've heard of severe performance problems from people who went the "upgrade" instead of "re-install" route with Vista. If your hardware is up to snuff but Vista seems to stutter anyway, maybe that's the issue?

Vista definately likes as much ram as you can throw at it. All the pre-fetching it does means that it can and will use as much as is available.

Regarding a clean install versus a Vista upgrade, the performance improvement that you get from doing a clean install is negligble. Extremetech did an article on this, and found that while more often than not you got a few extra fps from a clean install that some games like Company of Heroes and Doom 3 got slightly more from an Upgrade. Interesting note, Company of Heroes gets better performance on Vista, than on XP. Media Encoding seemed to be improved.

I'll note that their test machine does run 2GB of memory.

Vista Performance Shootout: Upgrade Vs. Clean Installation

[JCoyote]

I have 2gigs of RAM too (and high end RAM at that) so even my x64 advantages might have something to do with that.

[Foz]

Many people will swear up and down how important memory is, and to a large extent this is the case: it is very helpful, and apparently more so with the way Vista works. That said, I can't help but feel that many people have overemphasized the importance of ram. It's important, but I suspect many players don't put enough effort into freeing up the ram they do have so it can be most effectively used by a game. If you've been using the same OS installation for any length of time and have not spent much time adjusting what your computer runs at start-up, chances are your ram is being pissed away on tons of fairly worthless processes. This can create the illusion that you have insufficient ram, when in fact the problem is that you have insufficient FREE ram. I've been running the game on 1 GB of ram since I got it (on an overclocked Athlon XP 2000 w/ GeForce 7600 GT) and have not had even ONE CTD. I'm playing with everything at max except unit size kept to normal, I like the manageable unit sizes. It also doesn't seem to slow down for me ever. I run a pretty tight ship with my XP install though, keep it clean and routinely whack needless processes, programs, and services. So the trick isn't so much to have more ram than 1GB, it's to properly optimize your ram usage so you can actually put the vast majority of the ram you've got into running the game, rather than other crap.