Minimum edition of Vista for Sage and EVR

[bthurber]

I have an Intel IDG45 motherboard with an embedded video chip - which although it works with XP, it supposedly works much better with Vista. Now that Sage beta supports EVR, I'm considering getting OEM Vista for it. I have Vista Ultimate on my laptop, but that's overkill. It looks like Home Premium is the way to go for $99 at Newegg. Does this sound right?

Brad

[carlgar]

The Visa Home Premium version is what use and it works fine.

[wayner]

I use HP as well but there is an argument for using Vista Business - it doesn't have VMC so you won't have any potential problems of VMC trying to start when using your remote control to starg Sage or press Guide or some other buttons that can conflict.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by wayner

I use HP as well but there is an argument for using Vista Business - it doesn't have VMC so you won't have any potential problems of VMC trying to start when using your remote control to starg Sage or press Guide or some other buttons that can conflict.

Some group policy changes should sort that out.

If you have a MCE remote that you want to use with Sage, SageTVLauncher will detect ehtray (the application that launches MC when you press a button on the remote) and terminate it anytime it launches.

[PosterBoy]

Just a suggestion, but you may be better off staying with XP and spending the $99 on a better video card. You can get a board that will easily handle playing HD video on Sage. I have 5 computers at my house, and I have 3 copies of Vista. I only run Vista on 2 of the 5 machines that are both less than a year old. Vista has lots of eye candy, but I dont know of ANYTHING that runs faster on a machine with Vista on it.

Even Microsoft appears to be trying to make Vista go away with an ASAP release of Windows 7. I would propose you spend the money on better hardware and upgrade to windows 7 when it comes out. I am hoping, and hopeful from the press surrounding it that Windows 7 will address the ills of Vista.

Also FYI, I did some research and it appears that you can get EVR working on XP by installing either a patch to DirectX or .NET 3.0

Hope that helps


Kent

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by PosterBoy

Just a suggestion, but you may be better off staying with XP and spending the $99 on a better video card. You can get a board that will easily handle playing HD video on Sage. I have 5 computers at my house, and I have 3 copies of Vista. I only run Vista on 2 of the 5 machines that are both less than a year old. Vista has lots of eye candy, but I dont know of ANYTHING that runs faster on a machine with Vista on it.

Even Microsoft appears to be trying to make Vista go away with an ASAP release of Windows 7. I would propose you spend the money on better hardware and upgrade to windows 7 when it comes out. I am hoping, and hopeful from the press surrounding it that Windows 7 will address the ills of Vista.

Also FYI, I did some research and it appears that you can get EVR working on XP by installing either a patch to DirectX or .NET 3.0

Hope that helps


Kent

Sorry, but this is the kind of FUD that gives Vista a bad rap. IMHO, Vista runs great. I have had no issues with it since SP1 came out and even before then. It's just been problem free on the system I have listed as a client.

I will only run XP on my server though. I've read about too many tweaks that need to take place to get it to run properly on Vista. My headless XP box runs my SageTV server wonderfully.

[PosterBoy]

I never said issues. After some initial driver problems, I have had clean runs with Vista. I generally like it aside from the fact that 2 GB of memory doesn't seem to be enough It is a ton slower than XP and there is no denying that. If he is trying to increase the speed of his system, I think he is in for disappointment if he moves to Vista

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by PosterBoy

I never said issues. After some initial driver problems, I have had clean runs with Vista. I generally like it aside from the fact that 2 GB of memory doesn't seem to be enough It is a ton slower than XP and there is no denying that. If he is trying to increase the speed of his system, I think he is in for disappointment if he moves to Vista

No, Vista won't increase the speed. I wouldn't expect it to. I wouldn't expect any OS to "increase the speed." Vista runs fine with 2GB of RAM. The only reason I upgraded to 4GB was because RAM was so cheap there wasn't really any reason not to as I was already running Vista x64.

As far as performance goes between XP and Vista I wouldn't say that it's "a ton slower." A little maybe on the proper hardware. But as long as you don't overburden your system with a bunch of junk it should nearly as fast as XP. Game performance between the two now is practically the same.

Most of the bad publicity still going around about Vista is simply FUD.

[briands]

OEM, Retail, upgrade???

I seem to remember when Vista came out (actually XP was a bit like this too) that there was concern for people who tend to reconfigure and reinstall frequently. Are there any real limitations to any of the versions?

Would the Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1 that NewEgg has for $79.99 be a good buy for client?

[Ryokurin]

Originally Posted by PosterBoy

Also FYI, I did some research and it appears that you can get EVR working on XP by installing either a patch to DirectX or .NET 3.0

Hope that helps


Kent

Keep in mind that while you'll get EVR support by installing .net 3.0, you still won't get hardware acceleration. As for Vista vs. XP its a matter of choice, but as others have said, the ones who have gone to it with an open mind, are just fine with it.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Taddeusz

As far as performance goes between XP and Vista I wouldn't say that it's "a ton slower." A little maybe on the proper hardware. But as long as you don't overburden your system with a bunch of junk it should nearly as fast as XP. Game performance between the two now is practically the same.

If you turn off all the slick UI features (i.e. make it look like XP); the difference is marginal (I don't turn them off, but you can).

There are many good reasons to prefer Vista over XP, esp in a HTPC.

Top of my head:

- better security model/features
- running in a limited user context is relatively seamless
- EVR
- better audio stack
- if you don't have DVD sw, DVD MPEG2 A/V decoders are included
- power management that works OOTB
- improved W32 API; developers can create cooler applicaitons
- search everywhere (esp nice from the start menu)
- better support for multi-core cpu

[Wheemer]

The limitations of Vista include the network throttling & superfetch. I have a gigabit network with Vista Ultimate and windows 2003. I cannot record HD content from my HDHR over the network to my vista machine. The recordings end up corrupt. But when recording on the windows 2003 machine they record perfect.

No amount of tweaking or even disabling network throttling and superfetch, has proven to be useful.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Wheemer

The limitations of Vista include the network throttling & superfetch. I have a gigabit network with Vista Ultimate and windows 2003. I cannot record HD content from my HDHR over the network to my vista machine. The recordings end up corrupt. But when recording on the windows 2003 machine they record perfect.

No amount of tweaking or even disabling network throttling and superfetch, has proven to be useful.

You can disable throttling (although I've never had an issue with it post sp1); if doing so has not affect you might be blaming the wrong thing.

[Wheemer]

Yeah I might be specifically blaming the wrong thing... but generally the blame is definately properly attributed to Vista.

My drives are newer and faster (SATA) on the Vista machine, and older and slower (IDE) on the Windows 2003 machine. So the evidence reads clear. No need to pin down the specifics.

[toricred]

I've been thinking of putting Vista 64-bit on my server. It is a headless server so I'm not sure if there would be any benefit other than using all of my 4GB of RAM. Thoughts?

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Wheemer

Yeah I might be specifically blaming the wrong thing... but generally the blame is definately properly attributed to Vista.

My drives are newer and faster (SATA) on the Vista machine, and older and slower (IDE) on the Windows 2003 machine. So the evidence reads clear. No need to pin down the specifics.

Even a USB attached hard drive would have more than adequate bandwidth to persist a HD ATSC stream. Chances are, your issues with the HDHR are either a crap driver or configuration issue.

[Wheemer]

Did you read the part about how the recordings are fine after ONLY changing the recording location?

Also happen with my firewire recordings in the exact same mannor.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by toricred

I've been thinking of putting Vista 64-bit on my server. It is a headless server so I'm not sure if there would be any benefit other than using all of my 4GB of RAM. Thoughts?

If you have a legit need to address > 3.2ish GB of RAM, or > 2 GB per process than yes; otherwise I think the hassle isn't worth it.

[babgvant]

Originally Posted by Wheemer

Did you read the part about how the recordings are fine after ONLY changing the recording location?

Also happen with my firewire recordings in the exact same mannor.

If you can record to a PC with w2k3, and cannot to a PC with Vista it doesn't necessarily mean that Vista is the problem.

Even if you installed Vista on the same HW config as your w2k3 box, you would still have to eliminate other variables (like drivers and configuration) before you could claim with any veracity that Vista was the root cause.

I don't have a HDHR, but I have been able to record content using firewire on a Vista machine which would eliminate Vista as the root cause (at least on some hardware configurations) for that issue.

There was a time when Vista deserved some of the bad press that it got (although even then it was mostly driver problems), but post sp1 that's not true.

[toricred]

My thinking on 64-bit was to help with transcoding. I'm transcoding up to 3 HD streams while recording up to 2 HD streams and have 4 HD100s for clients. I want to give the transcoding processes as much memory as possible to help with the speed. I believe that HandBrake works as a 64-bit app if given the chance.