Back to Vista

I have had the opportunity to get my hands on a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. I have to say it looks nice especially with the animated backgrounds. It is like the Enterprise edition however it runs with around 20 less processes at startup.

I did however start getting BSOD shortly after installing my drivers. I was determined to think that it was my sound drivers because it crashed wile I was installing them. So I tried uninstalling them, installing different ones, reinstalling. However nothing worked. So I uninstalled my ATI drivers and I have only had one crash since and that was me trying to play Test Drive Unlimited without video drivers installed, and this was expected just to prove that it was my ATI drivers.

Which brings me to the matter of the new Vista BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) it does not tell you what is wrong like the original ones with Windows 95+. It is just literately a blue screen and your computer ceases up on you and you are forced to cold boot. Windows should have left it, because when I used to get the BSOD with older operating systems at least you had an idea of what caused it by the information given in the error message.

ATI really needs to get some stable drivers going for Vista, at least for the X800 XTPE that is. I have the idea that they are more worried about getting their new cards to be compatible with the operating system but when I looked at the Valve survey results the most used card by people was the X800 card. This would cause one to believe that it would be the card that the companies try and have everything working for first.

I have not had a chance to install and do some testing of the games much, but when I was able to play Test Drive Unlimited with the drivers that crapped out on me after a wile I did not notice any hold back of the frame rate even with it maxed out which is more than I can say for Vista when I was running Enterprise.

I would still not recommend that people switch till SP1 for Vista, but I will be doing more testing and keeping logs of what I do so that I can post results for programs that I have problems with and guides to getting others working.

IcIrIs Out!