Gaming/processor benefit to Vista 64?

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Providence

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 23, 2006
Messages
193
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

I was reading the Wiki on Vista, and Ultimate edition seems nice...anyway, I have two 24" monitors, so I do a lot of multitasking. That means Age of Empires III, TV tuner card, bit torrent, and IE7 all at once. Naturally, I got blue screen errors frequently till I figured out that I'm running too many processes at once. My specs are outstanding, so it's not like any of the apps were running slowly...I think Windows just doesn't like doing all that at once.

So, a 64 bit operating system is for me, right? I can't find it on Wiki, but it won't affect compatiblity with games or other stuff, will it? Just the extra processing abilities?
 
I wonder how many times this question will be asked before someone just searches for the answer? ;)

Anyway, Windows won't BSoD just because you have a lot of processes running, unless maybe you have bad memory. When you get the BSoDs, you should look the codes up and figure out what is actually wrong.

As far as compatibility, you have to research the games and applications you use to determine their compatibility. Vista won't be publicly available until Jan 30th, and even then there will be some early hiccups. You have plenty of time to do your reading and researching.
 
Interesting...it's not 32-bit related? Because the errors stopped when I didn't run as many applications at once...

As for the error codes, it's unfortunate that I do not have them written down now, but each time there was a different one and one that was the same. Googling them didn't yield any results.

Sorry for the repeated topic >_>
 
Have you run memtest to check out your memory? If that passes, how about testing out your hard drive.
 
EDIT:

Sorry, google is my friend. I found that utility and I will try that. Thanks for the advice.
 
Djines is prolly right, you should post your specs and run things one by one until you find the poopy app that's BSOD'ing your system.
 
I can run Photoshop, IE, Mozilla, WOW, and iTunes, among other things, all at the same times, never a hiccup. 24 hours stable with 3x Prime95 (first thing I did once I had my box up and running), memtest stable.

memtest and Prime95 are your friends. Use them, love them.
 
Providence said:
Interesting...it's not 32-bit related? Because the errors stopped when I didn't run as many applications at once...
Click to expand...

That would be common. If you start applications, they populate different memory segments, different hdd segments are read and written to. So, the more apps you open, the higher the chances of "hitting" the bad memory sector or bad harddrive sector. It only makes sense and strenghtens the theory about memory related errors.

PS: Stick with Vista 32bit. It'll give you the most compatibility and will almost certainly work with all your current apps and games. With 64Bit, the driver situation is a lot worse, some programs simply don't work at all and most of them don't take advantage of the 64bit unless compiled explicitly for 64bit, which are far and few in between.
 
EDIT:

Heh, I keep answering my own questions. Anyway, it's not my memory, or at least memtest didn't find any errors...on 10 passes >_>; but anyway, my memory seems to be fine.

I don't think it's any particular application causing the error...I'm somewhat disappointed because I was hoping the 64-bit operating system would be the ultimate solution.
 
Okay, so this is really freaky guys. I don't know if it's even my operating system anymore.

Anyway, I went downstairs to watch the new episode of Scrubs (it was good). So, I paused my Age of Empires III game. The only other applications open were an IE 7 window and my TV tuner card on the other monitor. Nothing too intensive, right?

I came back up and the BSOD was on. Okay, this has happened before. I stopped keeping track of the hex codes because googling them never yielded a result, but this time it said nv4_disp.

Also, this is what REALLY freaked me out. I went to do what I usually do, which is just hold the power button in till it turns off and I reboot. But this time instead of turning off my computer sounds like a freaking jet engine. Dust was blowing out the back and I thought the thing was gonna catch fire. Some fan, not sure which one, went absolutely nuts and probably damn near burned out. Anyway, it rebooted fine, and I got this error to send to microsoft:

http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/428/untitledxg2.png

It recommends I updated my video card drivers, but I'm anal about that kind of thing. Unless there's been a new release this month, my 7900GT is up to date.

I might even be on the wrong board now, but to be honest, I don't know what the problem is.
 
I haven't seen you specifically say what OS you're currently running, soooo... I just re-read this whole thread again and I still don't see you mention anything about your current OS.

If by saying "Ultimate is nice" that means you're running Vista Ultimate, then it would have been nice if you'd simply said that.

Regardless, as djnes said, BSODs really don't have much of anything to do with the number of applications open. A BSOD is indicative of some serious issue someplace, and more often than not it's a driver related issue. I can load up my old Dell Inspiron laptop with 1GB of RAM with over 50 applications at the same time, with buttons all over the Taskbar and it works just fine, so the number of applications open and operating at any given time doesn't automagically cause BSODs.

If you're running Vista presently, any edition, the issue is this: the drivers really aren't done yet, and won't be officially done until January 30th - while Vista Business is out now and available in some retail channels, it's not an OS designed for gaming so don't expect ATI or Nvidia to be releasing fully working fully performing drives just because one edition of Vista is now available to most anyone that has the money to buy Business.

If you ran memtest86 through 10 cycles, that's pretty much all I needed to know to say your RAM is fine. Prime95 is ok for most purposes, but I don't like using any Windows based burn in tools - since doing so leaves that tool open to crashing just like Windows itself might.

nv4_disp is one of the Nvidia drivers - and since they're all still in beta stages with respects to Vista at this moment and probably until January 30th, there's just one problem you're having.

So, right now, based on what you just posted, the issue isn't with Vista, if that's your current OS, or whatever current OS you're running. It's with those beta video drivers, but there could be other issues as well. This is just the one you specifically mentioned so it's the only example I have.

Hope this helps...
 
Oh, heh, I'm sorry...I never actually posted my specs.

3.6 GHz Pentium IV
two gigs of 530 MHz ram (proven to be good >_>)
Asus EN7900GT video card.

Also, I'm currently running The 32 bit version of Windows XP 32-bit version. Service Pack 2.

So, I'm still scratching my head when it comes to what the heck is causing this problem. Thanks for the vista advice, but I've never used it or seen it in person...just screens from friends and the Internet.

In the meanwhile, I'm going to tinker around a bit and see if I come up with anything. You guys seem to agree that I should be able to open up quite a few processes without getting an error message, so clearly something is wrong....hmm....
 
Just curious but when was the last time you did a nice clean install of the OS? And if you recently upgraded components, did you merely do a swap of components for old ones (as in replaced the mobo, CPU, video card, etc. and kept the original Windows installation even with the new hardware)?

If so, that will all relate to the problems you're having. A lot of people will have a Windows installation that's several years old, and they keep upgrading or updating the hardware in the machine with a new mobo because they found a better one, or a new CPU to get more processing power, or new RAM to get more capabilities, a new video card to play newer games, etc.

The issue comes from them not doing a nice clean install in the face of the kinds of issues you seem to be having. Most of us, when providing answers to such questions as yours, rely on our own experience with Windows and computers to base our answers on. Having said that, my experience with answers is based on over 225,000 installs of Windows operating systems over the years and over 4,900 complete PC builds from the first screw to the finished product included the OS installed and tuned/tweaked for maximum performance.

My experience says: regardless of what other people will say, a clean install when a major piece of hardware is replaced or upgraded is always your best solution, even if Windows can "handle" such a swap, product activation issues be damned if you're running XP. It's just a "bump in the road" to upgrade or swap out major components and think Windows can "handle" such an event without issues.

Sure, it's possible, but in my experience, it's very unlikely.

So, if you can provide just a bit more info it would help. When was the last time you installed Windows XP totally clean on a bare naked hard drive or a freshly formatted partition, using all the latest drivers as of the time you did the reinstall? If you can get yourself in a position to do that, not only will you have an incredibly fast machine (the P4 and that 2GB of RAM is pretty damned snappy even by today's Core 2 Duo standards) but you'll be starting nice and fresh.

Vista should run very well on that hardware, and the 7900GT will most definitely run Aero with all the bells and whistles for the whole "Vista experience." :) No worries there...

Hope this helps...
 
Hmm, thanks for the insight. The last time I did a complete reinstall of Windows was earlier this year, to fix an error that ~I~ caused. You see, I bought a third HD (Western Digital 80 gig Raptor 10K) that I wanted to use as my boot volume, to complement my application volume and my media volume. However, I learned that installing Windows when three HDs are plugged in, and it will map the C drive as the first drive on the motherboard. I've done this hundreds of times at work, but none of the computers there have more than one HD, so I thought it didn't matter. Anyway, long story short, my volume with the Windows installation, the Raptor, was my I drive.

Kind of strange, right? So I went into the registry and changed it manually to C. Bad idea. After rebooting, I got the Welcome screen, and it never got past that.

Instant format. That was earlier this year. And yes, I have in fact upgraded my system's hardware...not just the HD, but the stock card was a 6800, which I upgraded to a 7900GT to support DVI on both my Dell 2405FPWs.

However, I did buy an arguably better capture card (ATSC 110 replaced with a Hauppage 250). I didn't know I bought the Media Center edition version at the time, and Newegg was going to charge a 10% restocking fee, so I just kept it.

Would that cause a problem? I just bought an MC remote and kept the MC card...has fairly decent clarity. It takes up most of one of my monitors.
 
The drive letter situation isn't strange, it's perfectly normal to see that, especially if you have multiple physical hard drives in the same machine. The simple solution to it is: if you're going to install Windows, pull out or disconnect all the other physical hard drives until the installation is completed, then reattach them afterwards.

There's a Microsoft Knowledge Base article and solution to the system drive lettering issue also, but since I've brought up that solution in the past around here and told by nearly everyone it doesn't work for them and it's always worked for me when I found it necessary to apply it, I just figured I'd stop mentioning it at all. :)

So, if you have multiple physical hard drives, yank the unnessary ones out or disconnect them long enough to attach the drive where you intend to install Windows and then bring the other drives back into the system equation after the install is up and running.

But you already knew all that anyway, right? :D

If it was my system, I'd just start over again nice and clean. The problem with troubleshooting the issues you've mentioned is you could spend hours, if not days trying to resolve them and still get absolutely nowhere, while a full reinstall of the OS and drivers (the latest ones, obviously) and all your software usually takes a lot less time.

After you're done and verify that everything does work, you can use something like True Image or Ghost to image the whole system right there in that moment when it all works.

After that, if you choose to start over again, it takes minutes - not hours - and you're right back where you started from with clean fresh fast installation ready to rock.

Hope this helps...
 
Heh, yeah, I figured out that whole drive thing on my own...but it obviously took two tries >_> At least they're in the order I want them in now.

Thanks for the advice, you're probably correct about the fresh install. Luckily my boot volume doesn't have much on it, so a new install wouldn't take long...I'll try it when I've got a day to kill.
 
And get some imaging software like True Image or Ghost, seriously. After the very first time you use such software and start over, you'll wonder why someone didn't think of that kind of utility 10 years ago - and they did, you just didn't know about it. :)
 
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