Vista – After 3 months
For the last 3 months I have been using Vista exclusively on my home desktop and laptop. After turning off Superfetch I have not experienced any slowdowns or odd behaviour. The various patches that have come out for Vista have made it where I can play FSX and MX vs ATV Unleashed without issues even though I was unable to when Vista first came out.
My normal memory consumption with Superfetch and UAC turned off is just under 1 Gig. Playing games puts me over the 1 Gig mark. I recommend that for typical use that 1 Gig of memory is sufficient and then depending on what applications or games that a person uses they may need to increase their memory.
The biggest quirks that I have had to deal with are installation programs that were written before Vista. Some applications can’t deal with the fundamental changes that were made with Vista in the relocation of the application data directory and the restrictions placed on writing to the “Program Files” directory. I even have one game that refused to run because it requires DirectX 9 and DirectX 0 isn’t sufficient. For some reason it trims the DirectX 10 to a zero. Telling it to run in compatibility mode fixes that one.
A program that I have for my Pocket PC would error out during the install because it couldn’t find ActiveSync. The company said I needed to upgrade to the latest version. The funny part is that the PC version of the program works fine under Vista and if I manually installed the program to my Pocket PC (copy the cab file and then run it on the PPC) it still worked fine and would synch using Windows Mobile Device Center without problems. When I asked the vendor how to install it they would only tell me that I needed to upgrade to the latest version. It was the only Pocket PC application that I have that wouldn’t install under Vista. I was surprised the vendor didn’t have a description of the manual method to install their application on their website. I won’t be purchasing from that vendor again.