So I'm looking at PCR on Vista now and my experience, as I expected, has been a mixture of good and bad.
Gripes first:
My Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio Sound card works but I can't get it to work well with my 5.1 loudspeaker setup. The problem is I have no bass and my music sounds tinny. All the audio tests I do within Windows, the bass speaker gives bass, but when I play back a movie or music within Media Player, there's no bass.
Creative supplied software with the soundcard that was full of good stuff. In one section I could tweak the bass til it sounded real good. That software doesn't work in Vista, I tried and had to uninstall it. All Creative supply are drivers and a program named 'Alchemy' which basically is used for game profiles.
So I'm a bit fed up with that
I have drivers for the motherboard onboard sound, I shall try that. If that isn't satisfactory then Vista is coming off of this machine and will go on my Media machine where the onboard sound is output to a hi fi amp anyway.
I will try and find out if there is a satisfactory sound card/speaker setup/software setup that sounds good with Vista but I really hadn't planned on spending more money. Whose fault then? Microsoft's or Creative's?
I installed Vista straight onto the disk (RAID 0 setup of 150Gb) that contained XP Pro. It's Vista Home Premium and it wouldn't let me upgrade XP, only if I was using other versions of Vista would it let me do that. No probs really I didn't want to upgrade but just so's you know.
I really wish I'd wiped the disk first because Vista informed me it was going to save the old Windows setup as a file named 'Windows.old'. And it did - all 97.4Gb of it
Come on, how stupid is this? It didn't even give me the option not to save the old OS.
And when I found the file and deleted it, it kept prompting me that I was deleting important system files and my system may become unstable, which didn't exactly fill me with confidence. Still, I zapped it and all seems ok as far as I can tell.
Vista constantly urges you to lock yourself to Microsoft so they can monitor you. This is spooky. You can choose not to but who knows what they're up to? You're almost bullied into opting for automatic updates - I haven't chose that option and eventually I managed to find out where to get and install the updates - from within the Control panel.
Ever felt nannied? You will with Vista. Every bloody thing you do, it seems, a window pops up saying, more or less - are you sure? You feel like screaming 'Yes I am bloody sure, just do it, you moron'.
Ok, that's the bad stuff, although I haven't installed any software or peripherals yet, onto the good stuff.
The only drivers I really needed to install were the Nvidia graphics drivers and the sound drivers. Vista took care of everything else - this was really quite fabulous. Although I did install the Asus P5B Deluxe chipset drivers anyway. RAID 0 did not phase Vista and there are no yellow question marks in Device Mnager at all
It looks great and I like the way everything's laid out, it really is a pleasure to use.
It is just as fast as XP Pro. In fact, I'm hard pushed whether to say if it's faster or not. It also boots quicker.
It has a ton of useful and interesting features, of which I'm only just learning to find out about.
And that's about it really.
I'm sure I'll have more to say as I install software, games and peripherals.
Right now I really am finding my way about, it took me a long while to find where to install IE's 'Favourites' folder from my XP install but I did find it in the end and all my bookmarks are now in place
Biggest disappointment is my sound card not functioning well. I shall persevere with this thing but if the onboard sound isn't any good, Vista may very well get relegated to a lesser machine of mine.
I do want this thing to work but right now I'm hedging my bets. We shall see....
