OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

I managed to damage my motherboard last night beyond easy repair.

Upgraded to a new PC (Intel Quad Q6600 4gig RAM) with Vista Premium 64bit media center edition.

I installed my old hard drive using SATA and its accessible plus working fine. The trouble is that any programs I try to run from my old HD is not really showing installed. For example SE5 is asking for the serial again, itunes thinks its a new machine, etc.

Can I import the registry from my old HD to the new Vista powered system?

What can I do to make everything import over?

Vista has this easy transfer program, but its looking for the second computer not a second drive on the same machine. It does what I need, but I can't seem to get it to look at the second drive to import the stuff. The old HD is the F: drive for the record.

Any suggestions? (think freeware.....IE no cost involved.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

Importing the registry in a new install is not a good idea; clearing out the registry cruft is one of the reasons to perform routine maintenance formats. Things would get even worse importing a registry into a new OS on new hardware. Your best option is to simply reinstall apps that need reinstallation. *

* Note that this precludes SE5, which will only need a serial entered again. It will run just fine after that.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

I think the same thing happened to me when I copied my SEV stuff to a new vista machine. I copied the game, all my mods, and extras from the old computer to the new one, and then it asked for the code. No problem since then.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

I've done the same thing just now. Entered my Key, etc. Game loads and runs fine, but when i try to load a saved game its all blank?

Is their a settings file that designates the saved game directory?

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

No; as far as I can tell, SE5 just loads savegames from a relative path.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

I sorted out the save game issues.

Now its about 'Performance' issues. How can this Quadcore with 4 gig RAM and a huge video card be choppy in SE5???!!!

Not the combat, but just scrolling about. BTW, this is my first experience with Vista and its REALLY sickening me. I'm so close to reformatting the hard drive and putting XP on this machine, but I'm worried about hardware conflicts, etc.

Any suggestions to boost gaming performace in Vista 64 bit Home Premium? oh, I have about everything turned off that can be turned off......that I can find in Vista.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

Vista does not have any native DX8 code; all the earlier DX stuff gets emulated in the new layers. This results in typically poor performance. Most DX8 games were designed in a bygone era, and do not stress modern hardware at all, so its not as noticeable. But with SE5, the game engine was made with modern (if lower end) machines in mind. Performance in XP is ok, but the translation layer in Vista hurts it quite a bit.

I should also point out that you should not expect "Quadcore" to make a lick of difference for 99.999% of games, since they tend to be single-threaded processes. You end up with lower performance compared to a dual core CPU with individually faster cores (there aren't any modern high-end single core CPU designs, but such would theoretically perform even better). 4 GB RAM is way overkill as well, since no process in XP can normally use more than even 2 GB of (physical) RAM, and they are designed with that in mind (ie: there probably are no games yet that will use more than 2GB even in Vista/XP 64-bit OSes).

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

I listened to Fyron when I got my new machine, so I didn't get Vista 64. However the fact that Vista 32 can't use more than 3GB of RAM never came up http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif. At least I have a spare GB if in future I upgrade to 64 bit.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

The actual limit in win32 is somewhere around 3.5GB, depending on how the motherboard chipset reserves hardware address space.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

I found a way to make the game play smoother in Vista 64bit.

Play in Windowed mode. It seems to run a thousand times better. Not sure why, but it does.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

I thought it could handle 4GB, but most people only saw 3GB because Windows takes 500MB as protected kernel something or other space, then it addresses the video card, which tend to be 512MB in most cases, which only left it 3GB worth of addresses to give to the RAM.

I have 32-bit Vista running with 4GB of RAM installed, and Vista recognizes that I have 4GB of memory, but only shows 3GB as the total available.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

ah well that's good. I'm getting all I paid for.

I read it was because it could only count the number of bits of ram up to a power of 32.

Re: OT: Need Vista help suggestions
 

Resolution explains a great deal.

Physical memory and address space are different beasts, and it all gets pretty confusing. A lot of the limits have to do with MS' marketing decisions, as per the charts here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...78(VS.85).aspx

That's only true, at the physical hardware layer, if PAE is not enabled. Its been around for a decade or so, and it allows memory addressing to use 36 bits instead of 32. Whether or not specific operating systems use it properly is purely up to marketing. The non-server versions of Win32 do not normally support PAE, even though there is no technical reason why every version of Windows 2000, XP and Vista 32 bit can't support 64 GB physical RAM.