Vista Ultimate/ Gaming vs. Multi-tasking

[Guest]

I think its about time Microsoft thought about how people actually use PC's
if im going to play some games (like Battlefield 2142 or halo 3 or Doom 3) Im
not going to be writing a spreadsheet in the background. Im not going to want
a bling desktop that consumes 500mb or ram im going to want the game to run
and run smoothly, Im going to want backward compatibility so the games I
bought 6 years ago that run on directx 6-7-8-9 to work. why not have a
seperate boot mode that will optimize system performance to run games and not
load a whole pile of crap that under normal circumstances I dont use anyways.
Basically a Windows Vista Gaming boot mode. It takes 30 seconds to reboot
anyways (max) and especially considering the number of times a process in the
background has thrown an error or popup that disrupted my gaming experience.
now I know that I could just use an Xbox or PS but games are built for
computers therefore it should be possible to get a decent game play
experience.. I am running a P4-3.2HT - 1G of ram - 600G of HD space and a
512meg PCI-E graphics card. running XP games are relatively fast but vista
what a joke. If only there where the selection available for Linux or a lower
price tag on Macs cuz I am so not impressed with vista.. I remember windows
3.1 most games back then you would boot from the game disk to optimize
resources. I think its time to bring this practice back.

Dave K

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http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/co...ca748&dg=microsoft.public.windows.vista.games

 

[Dale White]

Well, with a little tinkering and playing around you can scale Vista down a
bit. By default I was around 800MB on boot, but I kill alot of services that
I'll never use or don't care for and now I'm down around the 450-500MB mark.

While we all like the thought of running a game from 1991, the reality, most
people are probably not going to have a need to run the original doom over
an IPX network. So I can understand why they don't bother with having too
much backward compatibility. It adds more support costs, for a very small
crowd.

Also, if you're a die hard gamer, instead of booting to a slimmer Vista, why
not just boot to XP ?

 

[Guest]

Thats really not the point I was trying to make at all. I think instead of
having 2 versions of essentially the same OS why not have a seperate scaled
down boot mode for gaming. why would i strip the OS down to nothing? I would
lose what I paid for I mean if I want to play Battlefield 2142 I hit the
reboot and select a loader script for the game and boot only the game and
required Drivers etc. no explorer at all. and when I quit the game I can
select from the loader what I want to boot up.

and I wasn't refering to games like doom and wolfenstein those games could
be loaded in compatibility mode no problem. Im talking about games that use
Direct3d and Glide3d that dont seem to work in Vista such as independence War
1/2(mind you I havent tried since I installed the DirectX 9.?c SDK)

But why would it be such a problem to have a game loader that could possible
eliminate the OS requirements of all video games. at that level you could
essentially run the loader regardless of what OS you use as long as you had
the drivers.

Hrmm I dont even think Im harping on Vista anymore. Although it pisses me
off that battlefield 2142 runs like ass in Vista

 

[Guest]

Oh yeah and it would seem to me that the Hardware requirements for running
vista and aero etc already = a gaming PC but you lose a hell of alot of that
Hardware ability using vista to begin with.

 

[Dale White]

I understand you complaint, but it's really a case of can't have your cake
and eat it too.

You can't have an OSes that does everything for you, protects you from you
and has a pretty shell without pay a price. In reality, Vista doubles your
system requirements. What was a good gaming machine in XP, is not minimum
Vista aero box. To make it the same gaming machine that XP is, and to keep
the features, you basically need to double the CPU, RAM and video card.

I personally don't have that much trouble with BF2142 under Vista. It's
about 10% slower, but overall, I don't notice it, unless I run fraps and see
the difference. Doom3 runs about 20% slower, but again, scoring 95fps under
vista or 140 fps under XP, isn't something I notice anyways.

I never did it much, but wasn't there hardware profile you use to be able to
configure under 2000 and XP. Some people used that for gaming.

If nothing else, you could write a little script that you would run before
gaming to stop all the services you didn't need and run another script to
turn them back on. It's a simple .CMD file and the command would be
something like
Net stop superfetch
Net stop tabletPC
Net stop IPhelper
Net stop readyboost
Net stop antivirus
Net stop windowsfirewall

Then you could use another CMD file to issue the net start commands
Net start Superfetch

etc etc

 

[Andy]

Well, with a little tinkering and playing around you can scale Vista down
a bit. By default I was around 800MB on boot, but I kill alot of services
that I'll never use or don't care for and now I'm down around the
450-500MB mark.

While we all like the thought of running a game from 1991, the reality,
most people are probably not going to have a need to run the original doom
over an IPX network. So I can understand why they don't bother with having
too much backward compatibility. It adds more support costs, for a very
small crowd.

Also, if you're a die hard gamer, instead of booting to a slimmer Vista,
why not just boot to XP ?

Yep, I kept my Windows XP system for emergency System Shock 2. While SS2
does run in Vista it runs rather poorly. The other reality is thanks to the
raw power of todays systems vs. systems of the early 90s, games like Doom or
<name your favorite DOS game here> are easily run on emulated enviornments
like DOSBox, or VMWare.

Takes a little experimenting and a lot of tweaking, but it's possible if
thats what you REALLY need your [Vista] computer to do. I mean hell thanks
to emulation and virtualization you can run just about ANYTHING on todays
computers.

-A.

 

[Drew Boillot]

If you remove the OS, you put a lot more strain on game developers, as they
would now have to make a shell for their games to access resources, video,
sound, hard drives etc.. they'd also need to do more QnA as all PCs are
different..

it'd be like you taking out the dash on your car because you didn't like the
stereo..


I know in XP you can make what they call hardware profiles and if i'm not
mistaken, you can also tell what services to run/not run according to the
hardware profile... back in the '98 days, i had a program that was a shell
manger, that would change the shell to whatever i wanted, be it a game or
what ever, it netted a whopping 3% performance increase and wasn't worth the
hassle..

I have nothing disabled on mine, and when i startup my PC, it uses between
10% and 18% of my memory, and after abit it settles down to 13% (i have 4gb
of ram, so that equates to between 409mb and 737mb used for all services)

my suggestion would be to add another 1gb to your system, running Vista on
1gb is like running XP on 128mb, sure its doable, but you'll end up like..
well what your doing here..

My 1/50th
Drew