Vista - Eta Please?

i am currently in need of purchasing a new computer package, and am aware that most on the market are running Windows Vista now, however i see that at present Second Life does not support Windows Vista. I have read the blog info which says that testing is being carried out, but is there a better guide of time that can be provided as it will possibly affect any decision i make?

Although some people have had problems with Vista, many others have found it works perfectly well (or at least as well as with any other OS at the moment ).

Many of the problems seem to be related to the combination of ATI graphics cards with Vista, rather than Vista itself. For the last few months I have run SL on 2 Vista PCs with Nvidia GeForce 7600 cards and have had no problems with either machine.

If you post the make/model/specs of the system you have in mind, you may find someone who can tell you whether they have had any good/bad experiences with that pc and SL.

I'm running SL on my laptop with Vista, and it works fine as of this morning. getting it running was a bit tricky: I needed to DL the first look viewer. right click on the icon, select properties. under the compatibility tab check Disable Desktop Composition, and leave everything else unchecked.

Using the regular client works for the most part by doing the same thing, but I experience infrequent crashes and the odd dropping of connection with SL using the regular client, while I have yet to have a crash or get dropped from a sim using the first look viewer, aside from the occasional crash when I quit SL.

My relevant system specs are:

Dell Inspiron 1501:

Vista home (32 bit edition)
AMD 64x2 Dual Core (TX-53) 1.7 GHz
2 gigs Ram
ATI Radeon Xpress Series graphics card (Using Omega Drivers from www.omegadrivers.net/ati.php)

Vista 64-bit + ATI Radeon X1950 crashes under 5 mins in most sims. Same happens with both Catalyst 7.6 and 7.7 Also both drivers seem to have cause artifacts like missing textures. I guess that ATIs 64-bit Vista OGL drivers are not yet ready...

I concur. Everyone has been hailing Vista as the doom OS. However, I have been using it for half a year now and love it.

At first I couldn't get SL to work under Vista at all, but a few updates later it's working, but the performance is far below what it should be. I bought a new machine with a nvidia 8800GTS and it runs slower, framerate-wise, than my 2 year old laptop. And it really is just SL because everything else runs brillantly (yes, I have the latest drivers, etc).

So, yes it works, but not like it should.

Vista drivers aren't ready. Many of the features available in XP aren't in Vista yet. I get atrocious frame rates in Vista compared to XP on the same machine and hang up on using SLI in Vista, it simply doesn't work.

I have to agree. i E6400 + 8800 GTS 640 mb computer home with Vista Home in it and today i got new computer to work E6400 with Nvidia 7600 GS. Both have 2 Gigabyte DDR2 ram and good internet connection. My work computer has Windows XP professional and it runs so much better SL when i tested it. So for me i get framerates which a far from what they should be with Vista in SL.

I have an HP with Vista Home premium (32), and an nVidia 7600 card with 2 gig memory. I get 50+ fps on my island and crash say once every three weeks. The key is the V-Card being nVidia.

I agree, I have had it that time to, and today, I was online for nearly 7 hours today, non stop until I finally logged off.

FPS is great, using 8800 GTS 640MB and 2GB DDR2 and Dual Processor.

Half the problem is that most people have not a clue as to how they should set their Graphics card up and install updated drivers etc.

There are enouogh posts in the forum explaing what to do with the Graphics cards.

Also, you need to change the settings in Preferences for your graphic card to work properly.

And please don't say that there is no 640mb if your running that card, we know so click 512mb as SL recognises that..

Just to note I amended this to add my FPS which is currently between 68 and 71 and thats with VISTA........

Can you get any better with XP?

It supposedly works quite nicely IF you have nVidia card. Use ATI and you have a problem.

I'm running on Vista and ATI drivers on Dell Dimension E520 desktop and just occasional crashes. I had a ton of problems using the first look viewer but the live client has been okay.

32-bit or 64-bit Vista?

32 bit. As an aside, I do kind of regret going with Vista over XP (got this computer in April), I use the machine for recording audio and they've crippled the implementation in an effort to stop people from recording over the net or some such thing. I had to hack the registry to allow real time monitoring of the line in jack (Dell said that's an atypical configuration, huh?), and there's no option to record 'what you hear' with the native sound driver. That's what I get for going with onboard sound.

What is your processor and what kind of graphic setting you have?

What comes to my case my computer in home is almost brand new and it has factory installed graphic card drivers (one step down from newest). I just happen to have good comparing situation since prosessors in my work computer and home computer are same, graphic card in work computer is not even so good as in my home computer, same amount of DDR memory. Still SL runs much smoother with XP.

Vista 64-bit here. I'm using an Nvidia graphics card too. SL works just fine. With the last few versions of SL, the client has begun to crash my video drivers, but only after HOURS of continuous use. So it looks like a memory leak.

Nvidia is the way to go for SL. SL is OpenGL based, and ATI's OpenGL implementation has never been its strong point. Nvidia has been working with OpenGL since day 1 and it shows.

As for Vista in general, get as much RAM as possible. Granted, that advice is always good, but it is moreso in Vista. It's not that Vista uses a ton more memory than XP, but that it can make better use of your RAM. Unlike previous OSes where unused RAM just sat there doing nothing, Vista will preload portions of your most used programs so they load quicker. It's a different kind of thinking than the past, and a lot of people are having trouble getting used to it, but it works.

Yes as far i have understood Vista uses memory better than XP. What comes to tweaking of my system i got little bit better FPS when i installed latetest Nvidia drivers and set desktop resolution same as what i use in SL and i run SL in window mode. Next week i will get 1 BG more DDR2 ram and i am interested to see how it effects performance.

I got a new Toshiba with Windows Vista - all I needed to do was find some update for my graphics card andinstall it. The all was OK for SL BUT it is unbelievably slow! I guess it is graphics card problem again since I got a dual processor and 2 GB ram... don't see why it is slower than my older Win XP Pc... Have left off playing under Vista for now.

What Video card is in your laptop?

What was in your old PC?

Laptops tend to have very minimal video cards, and often they aren't true 3D cards at all. SL is very graphics intensive, so if your old PC had a true 3D card and your new Laptop just has a basic integrated graphics, then it won't matter what processor or RAM you have, it'll run much slower.

It seems Microsoft has today informed about hotfix which fixes/improves Windows Vista Display Driver Model (WDDM) video gard memory usage

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=3060
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105

Although its not published as an official Microsoft patch yet (it will be included incoming Vista SP1) there seems to be no performance lowering with hotfix and memory usage in 32 bit Vista improves greatly (Anandtech article)

Personally i will install it as soon as i get home.