Peter Vatistas

I am sure by now most of you have had a chance to see Microsoft’s new OS called Windows Vista. You’ve also probably heard of the many issues people have with Vista on their computers and I have to tell you there are a good amount. I have several new computers and have upgraded all to Vista Ultimate over the last few days, actually one of the computers I upgraded the day Vista Ultimate came out (bad idea).Each computer after the Vista upgrade has had their own unique issues ranging from incompatible drivers to incompatible hardware. Being that all the computers I own are brand new, Vista Premium Ready, and well beyond the best recommendations for installation I was pretty bummed by the issues I was facing.

The breakdown:

Desktop computer: Dual-Quad Core Xeon 3.0GHz Processors, 6GB 667MHz ECC RAM, 4-146GB SAS 15k drives, and Dual 768MB Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra video cards with AGEIA PhysX physics accelerator. This computer is a bad mamma jamma and has given me a lot of problems when upgrading to Vista.

First (and also the most expensive problem) was the memory. At the time of the upgrade I had 1 GB of ram (which Microsoft recommends) and though it was barely decent when I ran Vista without all the cool aesthetics, there was a much bigger problem; it was incompatible (blue screen every few hours during different tasks using different applications)! I had to go to Dell and order a newer set of memory and because I noticed how crap the performance was while running Vista in Aero mode (the more graphically intensive desktop) I ordered 6GB’s of the new memory (overkill, I know). Problem fixed, no more blue screens, no more slowness at all.

On to the next problem: The FireWire card; just not compatible whatsoever, end of story, bought a brand new one and works fine.

And the next: Applications! Odd right? Okay I totally expected a few applications to have issues and there were: CuteFTP, MS Office 2003 Pro (WIERD!?!?), and a few other titles which I just had to wait it out until they released updates (Adobe, Macromedia, etc…).

Oh and one more: My $400 sound card, seriously come on already!! This was a card that I actually bought 6 months before I bought the computer & Vista but it was recommended to me and labeled as “compatible with Windows Vista”. It’s actually quite funny because while I was fighting to get everything to work properly I never actually remembered hearing anything, no OS sounds, no music, nothing… LOL! Oh well, I’m already down $1800, what’s another $450 right? Replaced and problem solved.

Okay now I am sure your thinking that taking the leap to Windows Vista is a bad idea but I do have to say my incompatible drivers and peripherals were a unique problem and everyone will have a different “compatibility” problem. With that being said, please stay tuned and check out my next post on how bad ass I think Microsoft’s Windows Vista really is, after the war on compatibility.

Tags: compatibility, drivers, hardware, longhorn, Microsoft, windows vista ultimate, xp pro