I tried Vista x64 when it came out for a good 9 months. I HATED it. Problem after problem. Driver issues. You name it. I swore I'd never try it again, and went back to XP32. Well, I started having problems in XP32, realizing my system was "slow" and wasn't performing as well as it should even though I had the "latest drivers". Well, I burned my MSDN ISO of Vista Ultimate x64 with SP1, and installed... ... ... I can't believe it. It boots up a good 4x faster than XP did, the speed issues I had in XP are gone, and I can do everything I want; play games, run visual studio, you name it. Looks like MS has done a lot to fix vista; and it's nice to finally have an OS that has updated drivers that actually run "quickly". Anyway... So far I'm pretty happy with Vista x64. It definitely runs faster than XP32 - no question... I'm pleasantly surprised to say the least!
where the heck have you been? its been working well for a while now, and i like it much better the xp .........what surprises me is you seem to just discovered that oses don't work well out of the box, no os does.. it takes time. vista got straightened out alot sooner the xp ever did...
Well I did run it for 9 months; and in that time, it was never "fixed" so I'm guessing SP1 had a lot to do with it... Of course the OSs have problems out of the box, but man, Vista was essentially unusable for me during that time.
Time to change the sig then, eh? Vista wasn't so much the issue for me, as shoddy drivers. When it first came out Nvidia and Creative were the source for the majority of my woes. Taught me quick to make sure any future boards had additional SATA chipsets to get Silicon Image.
I have been wondering if getting hold of a copy of Vista 64 is worth it. The price of ram is such that I could afford to get 8 gig. I put off upgrading because of the compatability issues on Vista's release. Shall I take the plunge?
Now, I'd say yes. BIG difference from the craptacular launch and following months. So far, everything has run perfectly, and it's much faster than XP32... much...
I may have spoken too soon tho. I now remember why I HATED Vista; it was related to video problems; hangs, drivers "resetting", etc. Today I've had 2 complete system/video hangs. I NEVER had that in XP32. Ugh. And I now remember the problem progressively got worse and worse, and I'm wondering if it's the same thing. If it does continue to get worse, I'll have to dump Vista x64. If I recall this issue is directly related to having 2 non-SLI video cards driving mutliple monitors...
Sorry but 175 are the latest Vista x64 drivers available (including BETA) and that's what I'm running.
Wrong: http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-ForceWare-177.66-Vista-(64-bit)-download-1992.html (Vista x64 177.66 No WQHL) - I'm currently using these. http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-ForceWare-177.41-Vista-(64-bit)-WQHL-download-1975.html (Vista x64 177.41 WQHL) http://downloads.guru3d.com/GeForce-ForceWare-177.39-Vista-(64-bit)-download-1969.html (Vista x64 177.39 No WQHL) Edit: I guess I should add more content to this post. I've been using Windows Vista Ultimate x64 (with a 9800GTX) for over 2 months now after upgrading my PC and I've yet to have a single problem. No hard resets, black screen of death, etc. Like many others I had tons of problems with Vista in the early days. Being an early adopter for ANYTHING you have to expect bad things to happen. Microsoft can't be ready for the billions of different hardware configurations out there on launch, it's just not possible. Things take time. Too bad everyone's impatient as hell! :bang:
Give this version a shot. It improved IQ and FPS in games and am not having any problems with it in Vista x64 http://pic.xfastest.com/z/NVIDIA%20%C5X%B0%CA/177.70/XFastest%20177.70%20Vista64.exe
Could you link me to a source website (prefferably in english?) or a forum post with a review of these drivers? I'm not going to trust something randomly linked from a site I can't understand. Especially .exe files. ^_^
I never had a problem running Vista, cept sound card drivers IIRC, but that was way back in beta so it was highly understandable. I've just never seen a reason to use it over XP. Though, I'm starting to wonder since XP has been going REAL REAL slow on mundane things, like just scrolling through files in Windows Explorer. Though, I can say that all my drives have less than .5% free space and are highly fragmented, so we'll see what happens once I've sorted that out.
Wow - how come Guru3D has these nVidia drivers yet they can't be found anywhere on nVidia's site? BTW it has nothing to do with impatience. Think about it. I'm using the latest WHQL drivers from nVidia's site for Vista x64 more than 1 year after release and I'm STILL experiencing "device failure" and video-related freezes -- things I do not get in XP32...
Because Nvidia didn't release them for public consumption. Many drivers are leaked or gets released by OEMs etc. Guru3d is quite famous for it's drivers, you didn't know ?
I highly doubt that has anything to do with Vista. Ever since the Vista release candidates started going out I never had a "device failure" or video-related freeze, most of the time it's the drivers themselves that are still bad. There could also be a thousand other things wrong. Any other part of your computer that doesn't have a proper Vista driver could be interfering with your graphics card.
You really can't blame the OS for bad drivers on launch. No OS is going to have good drivers even close to launch. This GPU responding thing, I have it as well, and it keeps my from using 64bit vista. That being said, I would rather use 32bit vista than XP, even if it limits my RAM.
i got it on release day and didnt have any problems, games worked and all the apps worked ever since, i didnt notice any difference after SP1 except explorer would crash when i right clicked but after a month or so it never happened again.