Vista Final - Solitaire

[DonnyEMU]

Wow that must be an old radeon, because aero 3d and the new solitare in Vista works great on my old AGP 8X Radeon 9550 on my media center PC that I use for recording TV shows.. You really should update your graphics card man. If it's a laptop I know it isn't possible but with that rocking dual core you could have such a better time. The 9200 wasn't designed to be a gaming card..

For those who are interested in why this game wont run (well if he installed the old XP solitaire.exe I am positive that would still run just like the old XP movie maker does..

For those interested the new games that are on the Vista Home and Ultimate release takes advantage of the new 3D support and shader technology in the latest graphics cards. So does windows movie maker for realtime rendering of transitions and effects which make editing and creating movies much much faster than say Premiere elements that requires the CPU for all it's rendering.

I have the vista business SKU installed on an AMD 64 HP laptop which has a GForce 4 card (no shader technology). It all runs (except the games and movie maker, until I migrated the xp versions over) and I don't get aero glass or flip 3d but it's still very useable and MALWARE and SPYWARE free..

Sure you might miss solitaire but for over a year Microsoft has warned you that the new 3d features (even those in the games) would require a DirectX 9 capable card.

[DonnyEMU]

So I have two more points of view on Vista after work today. So slow. Add/Remove programs sucks compared with XP. Everything feels like molasses. The machines with the Core2Duos and Aero support are a lot better though. Not sure why the "non-aero" interface is so slow.

One of the reasons that things appear slow is User Account Control. This is the built-in protection against malware and programs that might use the installer/uninstaller to install or uninstall things. Most things like this now requires admin privileges..

You can disable this function but it's not recommended for safety. The MacOS has a similar function that requires admin priviledgs for certain operations.

I have been testing Vista for over a year, and most operations (not related to User Account Control) are much faster. Also, in x64 editions they seem faster than XP x64 are on the same hardware.. I guess some benchmarks in the press will probably feel that out.

I am just amazed anyone is benchmarking solitaire.. There are other pretty cool games there like the new 3D chess which isn't slow at all even on less than a gigahertz.

[DonnyEMU]

@gizmo350

I support windows networking at a local accounting firm, so I am keenly aware of priviledges and rights.. First of all this depends on version of vista that you are running. Remember "Longhorn Server" is on the way as well that addresses all of this kinda thing in networked environments..

On home machines some people make themselves administrator's instead of normal users because this gives them complete control of the machine. Also some software vendors in the past including m$ have had software that only would run with elevated rights for reading and writing files and accessing other people's resources. On Unix environments most users NEVER have or run under the  administrator account, also true on MacOS..

Microsoft has been trying to discourage people from doing this and writing software that requires this for sometime (since the last XP update for security a couple years back). Running as administrator was required then, it's really not anymore. Also the way it's implemented also makes it extra secure so malware doesn't kill your system.
 

Anyway, my experience after beta 2 with RTM installed (did an upgrade install of my windows media center pc to vista home premium. That machine has several users including an ADMIN user, an MCX user account (limited user that is used by my Media Center Extender/XBox 360)..

All I can tell you is that after the upgrade (nividia chipset all the way AMD 64 CPU ATI 9550) I had no problems with any installed programs (except nero, which I don't really need anymore) this was not an issue for me.. Limited user accounts otherwise and guests were disabled, and it asks me for permission for anything that would require a "admin" account.. I think they took care of that issue mostly betweeen b2 and RTM builds.

I know on Vista Business on a network that things work very differently.

Even on the home and ultimate packages if you want:
Disable the firewall
Disable windows defender
Disable User Account Control
Renable the Admin account and even revert back to an XP security policy, you can still do this..

It's not recommended but everything I have heard so far here is related to a new security measure that can be disabled (easily googled for on the web)..

I do recommend people get a program called VistaBoot Pro, it gives you your boot configuration options from XP back and supports booting multiple OSes (XP, Vista, Aros, etc..)