Great news for Windows XP users

[tour88]

Hi all
If you have been waiting to upgrade, but have been put off by Vista's poor game play.
Well your wait is almost over, Windows 7 beta 64bit plays games as good as WinXP.

Using WinXP, Leaving Paddington. No game stutters. Great.
Using Vista 32bit, Leaving Paddington. Bad game stutters. Rubbish.
Using Vista 64bit, Leaving Paddington. Some game stutters. Poor.
Using Windows 7 (beta 64bit), Leaving Paddington. No game stutters. Great.

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBOBY

[overmarze]

Right so you are saying that 64 bit vista plays games with low perfromance.

Becasue ive had dual boot Vista 64 and Xp 32.
I got exactly the same fps in Trainz and in RS .

If you asked me i got slightly better fps in Vista 64 as i can use 8gb of ram.

[BadWhippet]

I agree with overmarze. In fact, I've found that Rail Simulator actually runs even smoother in Vista 64-bit than it does in XP Pro (32-bit).

I have a dual-booting PC (which means I'm comparing identical hardware) and originally installed RS in XP because I couldn't figure out how to install it in Vista. But I'd read a couple of other posts here stating that RS was smoother in Vista 64-bit so I battled with the install. I'm glad I did because, on my kit, Vista 64-bit RS out-performs XP's RS in smoothness.

Therefore, even though Vista is a complete tank with a few non-Vista titles, I'd prefer Windows 7 to match my Vista performance!

[djt01]

Hi all
If you have been waiting to upgrade, but have been put off by Vista's poor game play.
Well your wait is almost over, Windows 7 beta 64bit plays games as good as WinXP.

Using WinXP, Leaving Paddington. No game stutters. Great.
Using Vista 32bit, Leaving Paddington. Bad game stutters. Rubbish.
Using Vista 64bit, Leaving Paddington. Some game stutters. Poor.
Using Windows 7 (beta 64bit), Leaving Paddington. No game stutters. Great.

Yeah right, Windows 7 magically changes the way Rail Simulator loads scenery, it’s amazing. It’s like Windows 7 just miraculously changes the core code of a game and makes it use system resources so much better.

LOL, I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona that I can sell you also.

[rabid]

Have to agree with previous posters; on modern hardware Vista x64 runs at least as good if not better than XP.
On top of that for me it's been much more reliable (been using it for 2 years).

It's easy enough to turn off UAC which is most people's Vista bugbear, and let's not forget to disable indexing (Windows Search service).

If you have good hardware why waste it on an 8 year old OS?

[g0fthick]

Seeing as 7 is Vista at it's core, I'd really love to see what evidence you have for such claims.

[M1ckran]

Knowing how Microsoft work, Windows 7 might be not much more than a new service pack for Vista, packaged up as a new product to generate more revenue. If it is, and bearing in mind that I'm considering 64bit, then I'll probably buy the 64bit version for my Rail Simulator computer but I'll keep my XP-Pro-32bit's on my other machines. I'd be reluctant to buy a "new" system from Microsoft because they are always very buggy until service packs are released.

Many companies running Windows observe the maxim: "Always buy the previous version, at least until the current one has at two or more service packs or you can't read your business partners' files", and it makes sense.

It's hardly worth getting worked-up about though. Let's just wait and see.

[mikesimpson]

From a personal point of view, most of the above statements are rubbish. I have used Vista 32 ever since the early betas came out and it has always been better than XP for both MSTS and RS. Assuming you have a decent PC to begin with of course.

The only time XP will be any better is if you have a machine with virtually no RAM as XP requires less resources.

My original Vista installation was also dual-booting with XP, and using MSTS as the benchmark, the Vista was always much better than XP, and routes which would not even run under XP ran fine under Vista.

Mike

[Easilyconfused]

From a personal point of view, most of the above statements are rubbish. I have used Vista 32 ever since the early betas came out and it has always been better than XP for both MSTS and RS. Assuming you have a decent PC to begin with of course.

Good point Mike. I do wonder sometimes at the comments made on this and other forums about Microsoft products and how well the people making the comments actually know the products.

Many companies running Windows observe the maxim: "Always buy the previous version, at least until the current one has at two or more service packs or you can't read your business partners' files", and it makes sense.

In 20+ years of programming and support I have never found that rule of thumb. Usually it is a case of looking at the corporate portfolio and determining what won't run under the new OS due to vendors not being up to speed. The major players are usually quite quick but the smaller niche market vendors may not always be so quick.

At work we still have not deployed XP SP3 since that causes issues with some of our applications. Likewise Vista SP1. The hot-fixes are going out and Vista is available to some end-users but not ones who use specific legacy applications that are not compatible at this time. Nothing to do with waiting for SP2 for Vista etc. as M1ckran implies. Once the vendors fix their products Vista will be rolled to all machines physically capable of taking it.

Sadly due to a takeover it looks like I won't be around for the production deployment of Windows 7 despite being part of the non-public beta testing we have been doing.

[BadWhippet]

From a personal point of view, most of the above statements are rubbish.

I think most of the posts are actually saying the same thing as you though: Vista is better for RS. Pretty much everyone other than the original poster has said that.

[JunGRail]

I'm a bit late on this but people on here run to another new system because their PC hasn't got enough give to run Vista, i'm sure people are aware it needs 2GB or so to run, so why not get 8GB and be happy? and a 1GB graphics card, SLi (Nothing wrong with SLi) But Vista has been out for sometime and it's doing alright. It would benefit to read into building a computer to run vista, because you need a high end system for it

[rabid]

I've found that for games, Vista x64 is more than happy with 4Gb.

[CaptScarlet]

I've found that for games, Vista x64 is more than happy with 4Gb.

That is true, 4GB and 64bit work well together, with higher amounts it is a little bit of overkill unless you multi-task a lot. I only got 8GB because it was cheap and I have a TV card and it seems that a lot of them have problems working with 4GB of ram ( I ended up having to replace it with one that would work). I would have got 6GB but it wasn't a option with the type of ram I wanted to use.

John