The Drunken Lizard Pub

Lewis the Fighter isn't dead... he was just resting for the holiday season... expect him to be back to adventuring sometime soon.

Also... I'm running EB:1 on Windows 7 with no problems to report so far...



You can thank my hard drive for the horrid performance index rating... I think the 20GB partition I made is on the inside of the platter... everything else was 4.9 or higher... *shrug* Guess I'll have to install it on my WD Raptor if all performs well. Although... I've already run into some audio issues on some games.

You've moved on to Windows 7?!

Yikes, I only had the confidence to move my gaming machine to XP a year or so ago... I don't trust any Microsoft OS before SP2.

Besides, I don't think the machine has enough punch to run Vista or Windows 7, so I'll probably wait until I have new hardware before I even consider upgrading. I'm just hoping it manages to run Dragon Age acceptably.

Nice. Keep Windows 7 beta on your system and we may just have you try out Book II on it later this year.

Getharn wrote:You've moved on to Windows 7?!

Yikes, I only had the confidence to move my gaming machine to XP a year or so ago... I don't trust any Microsoft OS before SP2.

Besides, I don't think the machine has enough punch to run Vista or Windows 7, so I'll probably wait until I have new hardware before I even consider upgrading. I'm just hoping it manages to run Dragon Age acceptably.

Well, from the couple of days I've been using it, I'd say it's the most stable beta release of a Windows product that I've used yet. Performance-wise I don't see much of a difference between it and XP. Windows 7 on my slower hard drive (Seagate 500GB 7200RPM) boots faster than XP on my faster hard drive (WD Raptor 36.5GB 10000RPM), but XP is well past due for a bloat/registry cleansing re-install. It definitely feels snappier than Vista, which I've used on faster machines. I also feel better about having all 4GB of my ram addressable in W7 64-bit as opposed to 3.3GB in XP 32-Bit

Now, that's not to say I haven't already discovered a reason to keep my XP install... So far I can't get any fansubbed anime videos to show the subtitles (and I don't see me learning Japanese any time soon 0_o), and there's glitches in some games where audio will cut out for short periods during video and in-game cutscenes. I'll probably re-install both a some point; put W7 on my WD drive and XP on the Seagate. Moved on; not exactly. Test driving; absolutely. Gotta put that MSDN Subscription to use...

Check out this "performance comparison" article between Vista/XP/W7: http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=3236&page=2 What I would really like to see is a performance shootout between the 3 using W7's minimum requirements... but the article is interesting nonetheless.

BasiliskWrangler wrote:Nice. Keep Windows 7 beta on your system and we may just have you try out Book II on it later this year.

You're such a tease. >.< Fear not, I'm not one to shy away from a shiny new Windows OS, even though I didn't install Vista on my own machine. That was a personal choice based on my gaming preferences... and only having 2GB of ram at the time.

CrazyBernie wrote:Well, from the couple of days I've been using it, I'd say it's the most stable beta release of a Windows product that I've used yet. Performance-wise I don't see much of a difference between it and XP.

You said your machine had 4GB RAM? Well, looks like they've potentially only increased the bloat, then, rather than killed performance too badly. I found I noticed the difference on machines we moved from XP to Vista at work, but most of them had 1GB.

The main problem with Vista I'd heard was the lack of gaming performance - direct comparisons between XP and Vista machines on the same games seemed to put Vista at 10-20% lower frame rates. Admittedly I haven't hunted around for every comparison I could find, so it's possible there's some biased reporting going on.

While that sort of slow down isn't a tragedy, it annoys me rather that we seem to be caught in this endless cycle of increasingly slow and bloaty software. Being a software engineer I can appreciate that features don't come for free, but having worked on embedded systems in the past I also know that with a bit of effort, a lot of bloat can be avoided.

I guess you could say that partly it's the principle of the thing that offends me, rather than the practicality of having a slower system.

CrazyBernie wrote:I also feel better about having all 4GB of my ram addressable in W7 64-bit as opposed to 3.3GB in XP 32-Bit

Definitely. I'm still rather shocked at how long it's taking for the Windows world to go 64-bit, and that's not necessarily a criticism of Windows - all the hardware and software vendors are primarily to blame, as they're taking so long coming out with updated stable drivers. I'm hoping that Windows 7 will give them all the kick up the bum they need to start releasing 64-bit versions of absolutely everything, but I'm rather disappointed that Microsoft chose to release a 32-bit version at all. Having used 64-bit Linux for years now, it's shocking when people don't release 64-bit software and drivers - even Adobe have finally released a 64-bit version of flash for Linux (though still in beta).

As an aside, don't forget to enable PCI remapping in your BIOS with your 64-bit install, or you'll lose a big hole of you memory (can be as much as half a gig). This is assuming your motherboard supports it - not all do, unfortunately.

Getharn wrote: You said your machine had 4GB RAM? Well, looks like they've potentially only increased the bloat, then, rather than killed performance too badly. I found I noticed the difference on machines we moved from XP to Vista at work, but most of them had 1GB.

My reasons for 4GB of ram are that some games are finally starting to take advantage of having the extra memory (for texture caching and such), and considering my Video Card (AMD/ATI 256MB DDR4 HD2600XT) and Processor (AMD A64 4000 X2), it was the cheapest/easiest upgrade to swing. And I needed every bit of performance I could squeeze out of this system if I was going to play some of the new games being released. Besides, with DDR2 prices at under $10 a gig, it seems almost silly not to upgrade... ^_^

Getharn wrote: The main problem with Vista I'd heard was the lack of gaming performance - direct comparisons between XP and Vista machines on the same games seemed to put Vista at 10-20% lower frame rates. Admittedly I haven't hunted around for every comparison I could find, so it's possible there's some biased reporting going on.

Check the date on that benchmarking article... it's two years old....
Most of the gaming performance articles out there that I read showed a performance difference of less than 10%. That's not to say that some games don't perform worse, but anyone can pick and choose benchmarks.... ^_^

Here's something a from Feb 2008
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1390&page=2
Take a good, long look at those Oblivion scores all you Action/RPG fans... and keep in mind that Fallout 3 is the same engine...

Here's something even more recent..
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2 ... 500,00.asp
You'll notice that the two are pretty much neck and neck. Besides the SP1 improvements, a lot of that performance can be attributed to drivers finally being mature. For W7 it looks like manufacturers figured out that driver support might actually be important...

Also keep in mind that most of the benchmarks out there don't even look at the 64-bit versions of Windows...

Getharn wrote: As an aside, don't forget to enable PCI remapping in your BIOS with your 64-bit install, or you'll lose a big hole of you memory (can be as much as half a gig). This is assuming your motherboard supports it - not all do, unfortunately.

Yeah, my mobo already has that turned on by default.

I did have my first crash on Windows 7, but it wasn't the fault of Windows... it was my memory. I have 2 sticks of DDR2800, and 2 of DDR2667. Both pairs are OCZ, which is pretty overclockable, and I was running it all at 700MHz, so 2 were underclocked and 2 were overclocked. Combine that with the fact that 4 sticks aren't going to be as stable, and I was hosting a Gears of War co-op session... Let's just say I had to shut my computer down, take out the slower sticks, boot up, then shut down and put them back in before the system would start up right again... >.<


Also, I've run both 1.04 and the 1.05 beta demo of Eschalon and neither version can run OpenGl. It doesn't display the intro graphics properly, and crashes out at the menu.