Vista Tutorial - Is Vista64 stable? What's your uptime?

Hi. I'm starting to get quite into PC gaming, and thinking of buying an OEM Vista64 Home Premium. The only thing is I do a lot of seeding (legal).

So my question is - How stable is Vista64? What kind of uptimes have you had personally? All my drivers are compatible so will I be O.K?

Many thanks, Mark.

Welcome to the forum Mark,

I have had my up to two weeks. It would be longer if it was not for the restarts with driver and Windows Updates. Vista x64 has been real stable for me.

Shawn

Hi Mark and welcome to the forums

For me Vista x64 is rock solid, the only time the PC reboots is when an M$ update requires it.

I am not a gamer so I cant give my opinion on gaming, there are issues with some games but not that many as I understand it.

Hi there.

It all really comes down to what u do with your system. If u use it for day-to-day tasks and u don't play latest games, u will be fine.

Sure, Vista it's still not so mature in general and there are some small glitches, but nothing terrible. I have done everything what i could think of to bring it down. Well I succeded once, but that was expected There are ways of getting Vista (and every other OS for that matter) to its knees, but that's just fault of the end user

So, as i said, if u don't play latest and very demanding games, u'll be fine.
It's not a problem of these games, but again, drivers are not so mature too, especially x64 ones.

I also play latest games, not so much, but i have been lately 'cos of new HW. Latest nvidia 163.11 beta are performing perfectly in everything i play including: Stalker, Quake4, Prey, Doom3, FEAR, HL2 and others. I had problems with Stalker and latest official 162.22. That's it, I sometime play older ones too, these are also perfect. But i t doesn't mean that u can't have problems, i can't play everything out there It will only get better. ATi drivers are a bit worse..

And if u set atomatic updates to just inform about them instead of downloading and installing them automaticaly, ur uptime can be enormous

Hi. Thank you very much for the replies. So seems stable enough then.

I've never left any of my computers on for longer than about 100 days anyways (powercuts etc...) but it's nice to know.

Also, one more thing. If I buy Vista OEM it will be tied to whatever motherboard I buy, yes? So I will be able to reinstall as many times as I want, like with a pre-installed Dell or something?

Many thanks, Mark. (Sorry for all the questions.)

Mark,

Yes, you will be able to install the Vista OEM as many times as you like to the same motherboard. Just make sure that the OEM computer actually comes with a Vista installation CD/DVD and not just on a seperate hard drive partition.

Shawn

Excellent.

I'm buying the PC custom built w/o OS and buying the OEM copy separately, so I'll have the disk.
Hopefully I will see you all around the forums. I look forward to contributing - when I know enough. (Might take a while, I haven't used Windows for about 6 years now, lots to learn.)

Many thanks, Mark.

Careful with 64 ultimate. A few installation caveats.

First - do not try to install with more than 2 GB RAM - look for a hotfix after you install your OS - run the hotfix, then you can add as much more RAM as you want.

Second. Don't try to install OS with dual cars in SLI already connected. Start with one card - get the system installed, do NOT let windows install your VGA drivers - go to the website and install them there. Then you can add a second card.

I am on my 3rd reinstall in a week - had it up and running for about 12 hrs with 4GB and dual 8800 GTX - but then I started getting a driver failure error (its posted all over the nvidia forums if you are interested) than caused frequent hang-ups.

I wish you luck - but 64-bit is not yet ready for primetime I think. I will be reinstalling and then making my system a dual-boot with my old XP until the 64-bit support gets up to snuff.

Hope it's not the same with home Premium because my system is shipping with 4GiB. (One of the main benefits of 64bit is being able to address more than 3.5/4.0GiB of RAM.)

As for 64bit not being ready for primetime, I've been running a 64bit kernel for about 2 years now. Never had any problems, not even with Flash/Firefox. You only really see a benefit when you /encode/transcode music/video though. e.g ripping a DVD.

Hmm, the 4GB problem was not a problem for me, but can be for others. As far as I know, it doesn't affect all systems. Look here: Error message when you try to install Windows Vista on a computer that uses more than 3 GB of RAM: "STOP 0x0000000A"