What is it about Vista?

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I am yet to have a pleasent experience with Vista, and trust me it’s not like I haven’t been trying.  I’ve had some version of Vista installed on one of my many machines since it went RC1.  At work my new laptop runs the 32bit Buisness versions and well it’s just plan slow, I look over to one of my developers offices and the same machine running XP Pro is nice and fast.  Add to this the daily frustration of Vista’s intolerably slow tcp/ip stuck and the fact it doesn’t remove deleted file icons from its cache decently and well in my world it’s rubbish.

 So given this one may wonder why on earth I would want to take my perfectly working gaming machine with XP Pro 64bit and install Vista Ulitmate 64bit.  The answer “World in Conflict”.  See the Beta looks magic with dx9 and my twin 8800GTS cards, but as it’s also a dx10 title it should look more magic on Vista.  Hense I began traveling down the road to oblivion.  The nano second after I blew away the partition it occured to me it might have been prudent to image my old installation first as this in all likely hood would end in tears and much raging.

The machine in question is;

  •  Tyan K8WE Motherboard 
  • 2x AMD Opteron 265 Processors
  • 4Gb ECC Memory
  • 2x 150Gb Raptor Hard Drives
  • 3ware Raid Controller
  • 2x Geforce 8800GTS 640mb Video Cards 

So first thing on the agenda is the SLI, gotta get those twin beauty video cards rocking again so we can see WiC in all it’s glory.  Installed the lastest Nvidia beta drivers for Vista 163.x as these even contain a special patch just for WiC, reboot and whoa whats this? Code 12?? Device cannot find enough free resources?? WTF??

After alittle head scratching I figure out this is caused due to the way Vista now talks to the bios, in fact Tyan as well as other vendors have had to release new bios revisions to correct problems just like this one.  See if I drop my memory back down to 2Gb it’s all fine SLI works, but um like I’m gonna do that.  So I tweak with the memory hole settings in the bios but alas I’m not having much joy. 

After a good 4 hours of swearing at it, the conclusion once more is Vista just isn’t ready.  SLI has been around for a bloody long time now, but you just have to visit the nvidia forums and will see countless threads on Code 12 without solutions.  Disappointing to say the least.  At any rate at 10pm I reinstalled XP Pro 64 and everything is back to normal. 

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