Vista or XP?

[sdsean]

Hey Everyone:

I'm thinking about building / purchasing a new PC for my Media Center/HTPC setup.

I use my living room PC for a whole bunch of stuff besides just TV, including
playing games, music, burning DVDs etc.

I'm just wondering what experiences everyone has been having with Vista?
I have an HD-HR, and an HD-PVR, blue ray player, dvd-burner, xbox pc wireless game controller, tons of old Mame and other emulator games.

Should i be super concerned about drivers/flaky ness? Will vista run my old emulator games? Will it run older PC games?Does serial tuning work properly? etc?

The only reason why i'm really interested in switching is for DirectX 10 and also b/c I can use more ram (64bit, probably go with 6Gb).

[Skacey]

I started with a Vista system and was reasonably successful in getting it to work. It did take a lot more tweaking and adjusting as Vista has more security and some drivers are more difficult than their XP counterparts.

My system is mostly used as a server only. I had difficulty with some of the alternative add ins and customizations such as getting DIRMON2 to run smoothly with the right permissions. I also had a huge problem with IR Blasters as I was too cheap to buy a USB_UIRT so I spent two days tweaking my Vista Media Center remote to blast my satelite boxes.

Eventually I moved to Windows Home Server and it has been much, much easier to set up and maintain. Since it uses XP drivers, I had no problem getting most of the programs to work first time out.

I don't know about using one computer to do everything. I've not had fewer than three computers up and running for the last 10 years, so I'm not sure I could move back. I found it much too frustrating to buy one new piece and not be able to do anything else until I finished fiddling with it and everything worked again. Now, if I get too frustrated, I leave it until tomorrow and use a different machine.

-Skacey

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by sdsean

Hey Everyone:

I'm thinking about building / purchasing a new PC for my Media Center/HTPC setup.

I use my living room PC for a whole bunch of stuff besides just TV, including
playing games, music, burning DVDs etc.

I'm just wondering what experiences everyone has been having with Vista?
I have an HD-HR, and an HD-PVR, blue ray player, dvd-burner, xbox pc wireless game controller, tons of old Mame and other emulator games.

Should i be super concerned about drivers/flaky ness? Will vista run my old emulator games? Will it run older PC games?Does serial tuning work properly? etc?

The only reason why i'm really interested in switching is for DirectX 10 and also b/c I can use more ram (64bit, probably go with 6Gb).

Except for your emulator games (I just don't know what requirements they have), I think I would be leaning towards Windows7. By all accounts it is a "fixed" version of Vista and has more features than XP. If you can be patient for a couple of months, it is expected that OEM builders will start selling Vista rigs with a free upgrade to Windows7 when it is released latter in the year.

Just my 2 cents.

[sdsean]

That's a great tip sic. . . good idea. . .

I may just say only 3GB of RAM for now is fine, its not like i ever get past using 2GB even in the most heinous times of usage, but more is always better and I hate that XP MCE is 32 bit and can't address more than 3GB.

Its one of those things where I want both server and client functionality all on one machine. It sits in my living room where I happily play madden 08 and record 3 shows at once, and I'd love to be able to burn/rip while I'm at it. . .

(btw not saying I don't have mulitple machines, but for entertainment purposes I just want to do as much as I can all at the same time).

[valnar]

I would not recommend Vista, Windows 7 or any 64-bit version. Unless you have a specific need for anything other than XP, why go to it then retroactively try to fix things? I don't know how difficult it is to find drivers for all your devices, but Windows 7, 64-bit would undoubtedly be more difficult to accommodate, let alone all the limitations Microsoft puts in their later operating systems.

Some people here like Vista, others don't. It depends on how much you like to tweak filters and such.

Here is one thread you should know about Win7.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=145906

[gjvrieze]

I am loyal XP/Server 2k3 user... Working on Vista machines all day at work, made me stay FAR away from it...

[Skirge01]

Originally Posted by valnar

Some people here like Vista, others don't. It depends on how much you like to tweak filters and such.

Let's be honest here, though. XP can also need quite a bit of filter tweaking. I'm running XP, installed TMT3 Platinum, and it broke Sage. I restored to pre-TMT3 and things worked again. I installed the PDVD 7.3 upgrade and it also broke Sage. I'm struggling to figure out what exactly broke, but my files play fine outside of Sage. I may just restore again, rather than spending another 4 or 5 hours tweaking codecs.

[sdsean]

well here's what i'm thinking. . .

1.) Its cheaper to buy a new machine with Vista pre-installed anyway, so I'll go ahead and get that (prolly 64bit)

2.) I'll try getting everything setup, and if it takes me more than a day or two, then i'll just wipe the drive and install XP MCE (which i already have a copy of).

Either way you are right, its probably going to be painful. . . but I just wanted to know about experiences, and see if things work well in vista, since I'd really like to take advantage of DirectX10 and more than 3GB of RAM.

Like I said before, the interesting part will be older software. . .

[SWKerr]

I run Vista64 on my desktop PC with a Sage Client and it works fine. There is a lot of pain to tweak anything in Vista64 because it is locked down so tight. Vista32 is much less painful but I found it to be less stable than XP for HTPC duty.

For me the only advantage to Vista on a HTPC was the font scaling options. XP was never designed for high resolutions and 1920x1080 makes for tiny fonts on my HDTV. Sage is fine but web surfing etc is difficult unless I drop to 1280x768.

I also have never taken to the Vista interface. The new Windows7 is much more intuitive to me.

[Ryokurin]

Originally Posted by valnar

I would not recommend Vista, Windows 7 or any 64-bit version. Unless you have a specific need for anything other than XP, why go to it then retroactively try to fix things? I don't know how difficult it is to find drivers for all your devices, but Windows 7, 64-bit would undoubtedly be more difficult to accommodate, let alone all the limitations Microsoft puts in their later operating systems.

Some people here like Vista, others don't. It depends on how much you like to tweak filters and such.

Here is one thread you should know about Win7.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=145906

I can think of one reason for Vista. Hardware accelerated EVR support. I just thought of a few more. less of a need for reclock if except specifically for PAL content, a Geforce 8500GT I had had better performance for video in Vista, and better scaling of icons and dpi for high resolutions.

It's also important to note that the limitations is just in MS software like media center, or windows media player in the 7 beta. 3rd party codecs run just fine in other programs. Media Center and WMP are two programs that people here likely won't run, and MS hasn't issued a statement over the issues that Albain found, so for all we know they may have forced the use of media foundation to get proper bug reports over their codecs. They already pushed a update dealing with them as they were set to expire before the end of the beta period.

Is it something to worry about? Kind of, but until we have official word of what they are going to do it's not time to say its a major issue yet.

[paulbeers]

My opinion is always this:

1. For any machine that will do video playback, go with Vista. EVR is a huge step in the right direction (this means any full clients or single box solutions).
2. For any servers, I recommend Windows XP. If I ever get around to trying out WHS I might change my opinion to WHS, but since I have no personal experience I can't recommend it.