Vista Squad

I decided to finally get my home workstation onto Vista Ultimate x64. I know from my last OS install that my DFI Lan Party Ultra 4 motherboard and its onboard NVIDIA RAID controllerer (RAID 0) would be interesting (and frustrating)

And yes it did not disappoint! I tried and failed with two failed installs. I tried to first leave the existing old windows version there (not dual boot) but this did not seem to work even though I got Vista to recognise the RAID configuration.

I downloaded the latest x64 drivers from NVidia and made them available on a USB drive and Vista then gives you the option when you are choosing where to install the OS to add drivers and I added the NVIDIA SATA IDE and RAID IDE drivers to a USB drive so that Vista could use them. Although the first couple of attempts did not work this was a far better experience then slipstreaming my drivers into the XP/Windows 2003 Server disk using nLiteOS which I had to do the last time I installed an OS for my computer :) The install seemed to go smoothly although I had to keep on repairing using the startup repair option on the Vista disk as the boot loader type screen came up with a WINBOOT.exe error every time you restarted or powered down :( I think I removed the USB drive with the NVIDIA drivers after Vista setup had began and this may have been the reason for this?

I then decided that I would format the drive, put the drivers on one of the 2 IDE disks I have in the machine for storage and try again. The install again went fine and I got into Vista and hoped that all would be fine. I restarted and I got a message saying the "BOOTMGR is missing" I was very near to killing myself at this point (as I had an auction nearing its end on Ebay :P)

I had a look around the internet and people were trying all manner of solutions. I looked at my boot order which was ok, I found a suggestion to check my hard drive boot order. I very illogically moved my RAID array down to below another one of the other hard drives in the machine and rebooted. It now appears to startup perfectly!!! Praise the Lord :)

 

 

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Ravi Nar
"Somebody give me the baton I wanna run!"

Is it all still stable?

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Ray Booysen
ray@vistasquad.co.uk

I had to prevent Vista from putting the computer to sleep but that was the case with my previous OS as my Opteron is overclocked. It does not resume properly but when you restart it it does say resume was not successful, you can try to resume again and it does work. I have just prevented the sleep state. I am having slight issues with booting Vista sometimes but a restart fixes this. Once in the OS I have no issues whatsoever, no blue screens, all hardware detected and I have also downloaded the preview content pack for DreamScene. DreamScene is a Vista Ultimate Extra which really is animated wallpaper, very cool! You can also use your own videos too.

 

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Ravi Nar
"Somebody give me the baton I wanna run!"

Is there a noticeable difference in your pc’s performance when using DreamScene,

 i.e. what extra RAM, CPU usage compared with running the standard Areo interface.

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scottbelton@tiscali.co.uk

To be honest I have not noticed any performance difference, the animation does appear stop when other applications need the processing power.

I have 2GB of RAM.  

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Ravi Nar
"Somebody give me the baton I wanna run!"

Do you think the animation stops due to a graphic card issue. What card are you currently running?

Might be interesting to run some tests on using just Basic, Areo and the DreamScene just to see how the GUI really does affect the overall performance.

Mind you even if I found the difference to be quite large. There would be no way I'd part with my Areo desktop!

 

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scottbelton@tiscali.co.uk

I've been using X64 Vista Ultimate for about 6 months now and its getting better and better. 6 months ago its was a nightmare. these days the update service release more x64 updates than x86 that ive noticed. Dreamscene will raise your cpu usage to about 11% from 2% idle with dreamscene and the sidebar running. Im currently running an ASUS Nforce590 motherboard with a E6600 cpu and 4GB of OCZ PC2 6400 DDR2 800 RAM and a 320MB 8800GTS graphics card. Overall tempertures are lower with x64 vista than with xp so thats a welcome improvement for this summer heat.