Re: Question guys

Tom <noway@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Well, mainly the PC - unlike a console - has the burden of running Windows
on top of everything else. Think about this: Vista really wants about
1GB of RAM - and thats just to boot the OS. Any programs will need
additional memory, which is why you really need 2GB of RAM for a system
running Vista - if not 4GB.

You're wrong on this. 1gig of RAM is the recommendation, and that is if
you're running some high end apps at times. It can run fine on 512megs RAM.
My system is 4 years old, 3.2gig oprocessor, 2gigs RAM, and I boot up and
after everyting loads in about 25 seconds, I still have about 80% resources.
The trick to this is, is learning what you don't need running at startup,
and many things can be disabled safely for the typical user in the Device
Manager/Services. I edit 1gig music files (they have to be made into
wave/audio file to the PC before I convert them to a digital format, e.g.
MP3, etc) and my page file still is barely being used.

You've tweaked your system, however. Many people don't know how to do
this, and then complain when their computer is slow after it starts up all
5 dozen programs that all insisted they be started at boot-up...

Windows - and especially Vista - just isn't geared towards games.

For now they are not en mass, but when I was at Best Buy after Xmas, I saw a
good deal of games with the Vista logo on them (Game for Windows icon).

Meh. The sticker means nothing really. It's about as informative as
those stickers proclaiming "WORKS WITH PS2" you used to see plastered on
DVDs.

Vista still has driver and performance issues, and while more games run on
Vista now, not all of the older ones do, which is a problem... While
running some games under Vista allows you to use the new DirectX-10, those
same games will also run under XP, often with better framerates.

While things have gotten better, most gamers I know will stick with XP
until Microsoft pries it out of their cold, dead hands - or at least gives
them a very good reason to upgrade to Vista that doesn't require them to
sacrifice up to 30% of their system's performance just get to the desktop.

If anything, DOS was a better environment simply because it allowed for
direct access to the hardware (good for speed), and was such a barebones
OS that you didn't have to worry about running a bunch of other stuff.


Actually that was very bad because directly accessing the hardware could
cuase it to fail if something is wrong with the software controlling it. At
least Windows is the only thing that will crash if something is wrong in
today's OS. I can't say how many times DOS has cost a HDD full of files to
total losses because a program made it die. Also, the days where this was
pssoible, those OSes could only handle so much RAM, and the limitation is
that the most OSes that were DOS based, (up to Windows ME) those systems
could handle 2gigs RAM max, and that was hard to make it do on ME only, and
the largest file it could handle at any one time is 4gig, nullyfying today's
gaming bigtime. That's because DOS based systems ran (and can only run) on
the FAT filing format on HDDs. Also FAT could not journalize your filing
progress, whereas NTFS can and NTFS is secure and can be encrypted, FAT
cannot. If you had a crash on NTFS, it will recover your progress because it
made a journal of it.

I never had a GAME destroy my hard drive. Windows 3.x, sure. But not a
game. For that to happen, the computer would have to crash during a
disk-write, which in games didn't happen very often. Even if the game was
using some form of virtual memory, having that corrupted wasn't a big deal
since it was always re-initialized when you started the game.

Granted, some game companies were better with drivers than others... I
can still remember the intricate balancing routines you had to go through
in order to get everything loaded in just the right order to just get a
game running. Back then, you had to practically be a systems engineer.

Win95 definitely made things better for game stability with its DirectX
architecture, but the trade off was performance. I think it was a fair
trade myself...I'd much rather have a slow but stable game, than one
that crashes all the time no matter how pretty it looked...


--
It's not broken. It's...advanced.
.

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