why would you want home over pro? pro is better.
Doesnt Vista maximise RAM usage since it got rid of the 4mb limit in XP? Doesnt that have some effect for gamers and video or graphic applications?
Yes, in fact, I can only access 3.5Gb of my 4 because I use XP Pro. But, to be honest, my biggest concern about Vista is the apparent abundance of confirmation requests and hardware compatibility.
I use some pretty wierd audio cards in my computer, an E-MU 1212 in one and an Audiophile in the other, they are both specialised music recording cards, and I greatly doubt I will see Vista-friendly drivers for some time.
the vendor said id have no probem running the copy of vista 32 i was gonna buy with all 4 gigs on my system. but i could only get 3.2 gigs to work. also the 640 or whatever megs on the video card ate up that much address space. i had assumed it borrowed the server memory model (which iirc supported a theoretical 2xb max). so had no problem dropping the cash on that. boy, was i pissed off when i broke the shinkwrap, installed it and saw a number less than 4.
as far as audio cards go. ive had about the same luck under xp pro 64 as with vista 32. all creative drivers were crap. but that seems to be the state of sound cards these days. my solution, pull the card and enable the sound on the board. good thing i like my music kvlt, cause it sounds like ****
does anyone else hate the way vista deals with sound? one of windows actual good features since 95 has been its mixer. it was simple and to the point. but now all the sudden they thought they could improve something they did right the first time. sure the could have improved it, perhaps adding a button to toggle recording and playback, rather than go into the menu, open props and toggle a radio button. that would have been an upgrade. instead they come up with this elaborite mess from hell.
each in and out has its own damn menu, so you cant cross-compare levels, or open more than one playback or recording line at a time. also actually getting it to record anything is impossible. i wanted to fraps a video the other day and i had put a playlist into winamp, and loaded my game, set up the shot and began frapsing. pulled the perfect manuver, right on cue with right in sync with the drum intro to glorification of the black god, only to find that no sound was recorded from either source (both were enabled) if at least the damn game sound woulda recorded i coulda edited in the sound, but that was gone too. cant say if this is the really bad sound drivers or ms's bull**** idea of an interface, or perhaps its drm interference. any way its bull****.
what really buggered me about vista was the piss poor copy performance. it took 2 hours to copy over 11,000 files which took up about a hundred gigs, my routine d drive backup. doing the same thing in xp64 took about 30 minutes. excuse me i bought fast hard drives so i could copy stuff fast. vista didnt even see all 4 gigs of my memory. vista crashes the mobo+cpu monitoring util. xp64 does not. the xp pro 64 is a more recent version of xp based off a server codebase. rock solid and brutally fast (or rather drywall solid and as fast a blind, paraplegic dog, in non-microsoft terms, but better than vista).
vista looks pretty and seems different but its all just white wash. they merely changed 
of the terminology of things which are the same thing in xp, but named differently in vista. take a look at the control panel or the services. all this is meant to suck in the younger os users (thats most of you) by presenting something new and fresh for their generation, while its really the same piss-poor codebase with a cool looking (though no more functional) front end.
Vista *did* introduce a number of true and significant changes even under the hood.
The main problem though, that the majority of said changes is to facilitate the DRM scheme - in other words stuff that makes the whole thing painful for the user.
In doing so MS also broke a lot of all stuff, like the GDI (Graphics Device Interface). In other words MS once again wants to feed down their proprietary closed (...or more maliciously - vendor locked-in) stuff down your throat like they did with IE (...and look at all the "good" that one did us)!
The real pitty is, that Vista did have some novel and good security features, like its new memory protection scheme; or the sensible idea to *use* the RAM you have.
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On another tangent: before your rush off to get your Windows XP Professional 64-bit Edition (which you can do for free if you own a copy of Windows XP Professional), there are number of things to keep in mind:
- You need an x86-64 compatible processor:
- AMD
- AMD Athlon 64
- AMD Athlon 64 X2
- AMD Athlon 64 FX
- AMD Opteron
- AMD Turion 64
- AMD Turion 64 X2
- AMD Sempron
- Intel NetBurst
- Intel Xeon (some models since "Nocona")
- Intel Celeron D (some models since "Prescott")
- Intel Pentium 4 (some models since "Prescott")
- Intel Pentium D
- Intel Pentium Extreme Edition
- Intel Core microarchitecture
- Intel Xeon (all models since "Woodcrest")
- Intel Core 2 (Including Mobile processors since "Merom")
- Intel Pentium Dual Core (E2140 and E2160)
- Intel Celeron (Celeron 4x0; Celeron M 5xx)
- You may not find the appropriate 64-bit driver for all you devices.
i found 64 bit xp drivers for everything in my case. the only really crappy drivers seem to be creative's xfi drivers, which periodically stop working for no apparent reason. but of course the vista drivers do the same thing. the card actually works better under linux. most of the top end chips, mobo chipsets, etc have 64 bit support anyway. my old computer could run a 64 bit os just the same. yes 64 bit has a number of things that must be taken into consideration. but its no more a task than refamiliarizing yourself with the current technology every time you build a new computer.
