vista is crazy
expensive
Vista is the most expensive consumer
operating system we’ve ever seen.
Let’s take a look at the pricing. Home
Basic, which doesn’t include the fancy
Aero Glass interface, costs a whopping
$200 for a full version. Home Premium
costs $40 more, and Ultimate costs
an astounding $400. Why spend that
much today on a less-polished product
when you can wait a few months and
have a much better experience for the
same money?
The good news is that Ultimate
has a bunch of features that the
majority of power users won’t need;
the Premium version should include
everything most people will require for
home use—at least if you don’t run
Group Policies on your home domain.
Naturally, in Home Basic and
Home Premium there are plenty of
ads for Windows Anytime Upgrade,
which will let you upgrade your
“inferior” version of Windows to the
obscenely overpriced (and unneces-
sary) Ultimate version.application
incompatibilities
Even as we speak, there are literally
dozens of applications that don’t work
properly with Vista. And we’re not talk-
ing about garage-developed apps but
high-profile programs such as iTunes ,
disc-burning apps, and pretty much
anything that has to do with DVD rip-
ping or viewing. And virtually any Java-
based app that bundles the Java run-
time automatically kicks the desktop
back to Vista’s Basic mode, obviating
the performance benefits you get from
running Aero.no hardware audio
During development, Microsoft removed
a couple crucial gaming-audio-
related features from Vista, including
DirectSound 3D (hundreds of games
use DS3D to deliver positional 5.1
audio) and support for hardware-
accelerated 3D sound. This isn’t a
problem for new games going forward,
as most developers have embraced
the alternative OpenAL technology,
which will continue to work in Vista.
It is, however, a problem for legacy
DS3D games, such as Call of Duty
2 and Max Payne. When you run aDirectSound 3D game on Vista, it won’t
give you the option to enable 3D soundor features that require hardware accel-
eration, such as EAX.
Unfortunately, there’s no easy solu-
tion. Creative will release its Alchemy
application, a workaround to a problem
that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
Alchemy is basically a wrapper pro-
gram—it intercepts DirectSound 3D
functions and converts them to OpenAL
functions using a custom DLL. Alchemy
works OK, but we’d much rather have
a less-kludgy solution from Microsoft.
Hopefully, they’ll hear our cries and
include hardware support with Vista’s
first service pack.vista doesn’t work with a lot of
bleeding-edge hardware
The BIOS on the laptop you bought in March doesn’t work with
Vista. Nor does your high-end USB microphone. And you can
kiss that joystick-port-based Thrustmaster flight stick goodbye,
too. With any new operating system, it’s safe to assume there are
going to be some compatibility problems. However, we expe-
rienced more issues with our hardware just plain not working
during the Vista run-up than we did with any Microsoft OS since
Windows 2000.
The lesson here? Make sure your hardware is actually com-
patible with Vista before you purchase it. You can check by using
the Vista Upgrade Advisor ( http://tinyurl.com/o5bq 4 ).vista doesn’t work well with
some games
We’ve already talked about the excision of 3D sound from
the operating system, but there’s a larger problem. It turns
out that many online games that use PunkBuster to limit
cheating require Administrator access in order to work
properly. The problem is that neither the game, PunkBuster,
nor Vista actually tells you that. You just get kicked from the
server every time you try to join a game. The solution is rel-
atively simple: All you have to do is set the offending game
to always run as an Administrator in its Properties window,
but the entire process needs to be more user-friendly.
Please get to work on this, Microsoft.february 2007 MAXIMUMPC 3
1 2 3
4
5 6
vista requires a fairly
powerful machine
This probably won’t be a problem for
most Maximum PC readers, but many
folks who don’t play games will find
their machines challenged by Vista’s
system requirements. That Dell laptop
Aunt Edna bought for $500 last year is
going to struggle with this OS. While a
simple RAM upgrade will probably get
the machine running, it almost certainly
won’t be sufficient to enable Vista’s
bells and whistles.
For once, Microsoft’s published
minimum requirements for a new OS are
reasonably accurate. The recommended
system has a 1GHz or faster CPU with
1GB of RAM and a 128MB Pixel Shader
2.0–compliant graphics card, which
is a fairly realistic minimum spec to
get a decent experience with Vista. At
Maximum PC , we aren’t going to bother
installing Vista on anything slower than
2GHz; we’d rather have a fast XP install
than a slow Vista machine. In short, if
your machine isn’t up to snuff, take the
next couple months to get it there before
installing the new OS.