The Vista Journey
After 24 hours of running on Vista, I’ve decided to revert back to Windows XP. My Vista experience wasn’t too pleasant and was dotted with issues and irritants, most of them caused by improper or lack of drivers. nVidia was the main culprit.
Most applications ran without a hitch, but gaming performance was sub-par (lack of proper drivers, again). The greatest nuisance was that Vista does not support hardware acceleration for DirectSound, presumably due to some DRM shit. However, I did manage a work around for some games using Creative Alchemy (converts DirectSound calls to OpenAL calls) and an ASIO output plugin for Winamp.
Compared to the previous beta builds, installation was a breeze, taking only about 20mins. Startup time on Vista was also decent, if not faster than Win XP with the same set of applications configured.
I was planning on a full backup so I would be able to return to the current state when stable drivers are released, but it kept failing with IO errors, so I ditched that idea.
With that said, Windows Vista shows potential and has been improved over Win XP in a few areas, but my jump was premature as the lack of driver support essentially crippled the system. However, if you are someone who is concerned over sound quality (DTS/DD5.1/blahblah are also done in software), Vista might not be the choice for you.
Back to XP for the moment being. And I guess I need to be focusing more on school projects than all these stuff, but I can’t stop the geek in me.
