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

[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.