PCTips Box

Windows Vista, Microsoft’s first new major operating system (OS) since the launch of the Windows XP line in 2001, is due to hit stores on January 30. Vista’s launch has already generated some questions about upgrading, new features, tech support, and whether now is a good time to migrate your computers to this new OS.

To help you make an informed decision about Vista, we’ve answered a handful of questions that we think nonprofits will be most concerned with. You may even want to use our answers to assess the potential pros and cons of upgrading to Vista at your nonprofit.

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Those guys at ExtremeTech continue to pump out some really good stuff lately, today’s link, is an article where they tested if Windows Vista would run his current crop of games. All he did was he installed Windows Vista, installed all the latest updates and drivers, and he changed the resolution and the background image, no special tweaking was applied, and luckily, video card vendors have been updating their Vista drivers recently, so this will be better than it would have been a few weeks ago.

Windows has been the best OS for gamers for years, and Vista takes that to the next level. That’s all well and good for games made with Vista in mind, but what about your existing game library? Last May, when Vista was at the Beta 2 milestone, I wrote a feature in which I installed around 15 games on the unfinished OS, describing how well each one worked. Now that Vista is “done” (inasmuch as any OS is ever actually finished), it’s time to do it again. This time, I’m going to use the final Vista release, a DX10 video card (not that it really matters with no DX10 games), and all the drivers available upon Vista’s launch. I’ll also take a look at a lot more games, around 25.
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The folks over at Extremetech have posted a review comparing an clean install of Windows Vista to a copy that was upgraded from an eight month old copy of Windows XP with loads of games and software installed, both shareware and commercial software. This is made possible because the Windows Vista installation routine doesn’t just try to make it work overtop of the old operating system, like previous versions of Windows, it copies an image of Windows Vista to the hard drive and then does the hardware detection and configuration. (more…)