30 things you need to know about Vista

Anonymous:

What on earth is going on at Nvidia? Vista is now officially released and still we have no official drivers for the GeForce 8800 series (which is directx 10 compliant and so designed for Vista) and the drivers for the other GeForce cards still appear to be in early beta, work like crap on most cards(basically unusable on my 6600 GT system in all games, but a little better on my 7950 GT system), have a severly crippled Control Panel and no SLI support!!?!?. What is going on, I think I may have to jump ship and purchase ATI card for my computers now on. This is disgracful.

Jukebox360:

I recieved a copy of Vista Business in the mail from Microsoft and was reluctant to install at first. Well, I decided to go ahead and do it. First impression is wow. Then I installed some games. Quake 4 runs like a dream on my PC in XP. In Vista it is like running in mud with weighted shoes! This is the only game that I have installed so far and I am already considering wiping Vista and reinstalling XP! After my disappointment with the horrible Open GL support which equals no Quake 4, Doom 3, or Prey, I decided to continue on with Vista and give it a chance to redeem itself. It doesn't.

There are just no drivers out yet. Half of my hardware is nil due to Vista. X-Fi is not yet working fully. My 7600GT's fan never powers down, the fan stays 100% all the time! Some of my peripherals do not have support, yet. The Griffin Powermate, a handy device that I love, doesn't work unless you know how to hack it to work and even then it is not 100%. Game performance, over all, went down significantly across the board. I was very excited to hear about Vista and how it was supposed to bring about a gaming revolution on the PC, but now I'm very disappointed. I finally decided to go back to what works. I installed a fresh copy of XP media center and NOW I can use my computer. The Vista OS itself was beautiful. The applications that I use the most just don't work well with it, yet. I'm waiting and I hope every PC Gamer waits. The support just isn't there for most titles or hardware. One very interesting thing was that occasionally my mouse would scroll in reverse of what I was scrolling inside a window. I use a wireless MICROSOFT optical 2.0 mouse!

I want this to work. Until it does I will stick with XP. What are the advantages of using Vista? None, so far, but it is early.

Michael Bailey:

How did you get your PowerMate to work in Vista at all? What did and did not work? (I am desperately trying to get mine functional in Vista...)

Anonymous:

I have an Acer Aspire 5100, still no vista drivers even though the machine is marked vista capable. If it really was vista capable then they would've had to have tested it on Vista. Therefore they would need drivers to claim that. When are we going to have manufacturers who prepare properly for the release of a new os. It's not like they haven't had enough time to prepare for Vista, what 6 years isn't enough time???

UniverseJDJ:

I though Vista Capable means it is capable of running Vista on a specification basis. Not on a driver basis.

some guy:

Why buy there are all these cracked versions of XP and vista. If need one email me.

Vanessa:

I bought 2 Acer Aspire 5100 Notebooks about a month ago and just recently purchased the Windows Vista to upgrade them. The Logo says... "Windows Vista Capable". I'm very upset and feel that I was mislead. I had to call Microsoft because for some reason I COULD NOT just UPGRADE my Windows XP. I had to completely reformat my hard drive and start from scratch. Then once I went through the hourly process of installing it...I find out that there are no drivers for the programs on my laptop. You would think that by now all the drivers would be available and with the logo "Windows Vista Capable" that someone would not have to go through so much just to upgrade/install a new version of windows. I'm just now learning that I'm not the only one that is having these problems. If I would have Known all this before I purchased Windows Vista. I would have just stayed with Windows XP. Now I'm stuck with Windows Vista and programs I can not use. There are no drivers and there is no way to put my XP back on to my laptop, other then to buy Windows XP and reinstall it. Now, I have already spent $170 on the Windows Vista, to fix it I would have to spend another $100+???? How is this right???

matthew:

i was not impressed either that the drives where formatted to fat32 and vista only supports ntfs.after i formatted my drive and tried to install the upgrade it told me my key was key was no good.i would have to buy a new key to install windows on a newly formated drive and since the aspire 5100 did not come with a windows disc that was a problem.how are you supposed to upgrade windows that way?
i had to go online on my desktop comeputer and download windows media center edition 2005 and use the key on the bottom of my laptop just to install it long enough to upgrade to vista.
it is a shame microsoft is actually forcing poeple to pirate windows.
drivers are another issue the acer website don't even have drivers for the 5100 xp or vista all i can find is 3100
vista in my opinion was a 203 dollar downgrade and i am not happy in the least with it.

tin:

You didn't read the trick about doing the "trial" install then?
You can install Vista Upgrade clean by not entering a key during setup, then starting the upgrade from Vista. Seems odd, but gets it installed without having to install XP.