sending bug reports to Malfador?

Atrocities · #1 November 18th, 2006, 07:39 PM

Many of the people who are in the know about VISTA say don't bother with it. That says volumes about it IMHO. I am happy with XP Pro and Win2k Pro.

Randallw · #2 November 19th, 2006, 08:51 AM

Upgrading directx had one benefit. I was able to run a simulation with 6 battleships a side and 30 fighters with full tech and it didn't freeze. Don't know exactly if directx or the latest patch is responsible for that one, but anyway just as I was starting to believe the problem had been solved, alas, yep the whole thing rebooted

. If I have the time tomorrow perhaps I'll try removing dust.

Phoenix-D · #3 November 20th, 2006, 11:13 PM

Do you have BSOD reboots turned off? By default Windows XP just reboots instead of showing you the error message..

Randallw · #4 November 21st, 2006, 12:04 AM

yes I think so. I turned off automatic reboots due to system failure but it didn't happen. I think it's working because yesterday my system failed when I tried to run a corrupt video and there was an error screen i'd never seen before.

AgentZero · #5 November 21st, 2006, 02:33 AM

For the rebooting issue, if you right click My Computer, click Properties, then the Advanced tab & click Settings in the Startup and Recovery box, then unticked the checkmark on Automatically Restart in the System failure box, you should get a Blue Screen Of Death instead of the computer just restarting. If, after doing that your machine still reboots itself, something wonky is going on.

As for Vista, consider the following. Vista will ship in 3 different flavours: Home Basic, Home Premium & Home Basic. Their minimum requirements?
Home Basic 800MHz Processor, 512MB RAM & DX9 complient video card.
Home Premium 1GHz Processor, 1GB RAM, DX9 complient video card with at least 128MB RAM, and 40GB HD capacity.
Ultimate Same as Premium

Keeping in mind that it's usually a safe bet you'll need 50-100% higher specs than the minimum to get optimal performance from any piece of software, and you're looking at an OS with similar system requirements to a next-gen FPS.
As far as I can tell, the reason Basic's requirements are so much lower is because it lacks the fancy Aero Glass functionality, but it's also missing a fair chunk of other options as well, so you'd have to take that into account when choosing which flavour to go with.

Personally, I'd be inclined to go with Ultimate for the same reason I'd rather run XP Pro: I'd rather have the extra features & not use them, rather than need the extra features & not have them. That being said, I'm going to hold off upgrading until someone comes out with a DX10-only game that I just have to play. But that probably won't be for at least another year or so, if not longer, at which point upgrading won't put such a dent in the ole pocket book either.

Randallw · #6 November 21st, 2006, 07:17 AM

Yes that's the one I did. I turned it off and the next time it just rebooted as before. Yesterday I tried to open a QT vide that ended up being corrupt and the system froze before a blue screen appeared telling me to reboot.

Tonight I blew out all the dust with the air spray but it rebooted as before after I only managed to do 1 turn. I have updated XP, and I got the latest driver for my Video card. Before I only updated directX. I just finished playing for what I would consider a reasonable time and no problems appeared, so fingers crossed/knock on wood I may have fixed it. I hazard to be more definite as I'm slightly superstitious and to come out with any definite conclusion might jinx me for it to happena gain

Fyron · #7 November 21st, 2006, 10:09 PM

You can always review the crash messages in the system event viewer, under administrative tools... Usually a bit more informative than just what was on the BSOD.