OT: Need Vista help suggestions

Romulus68 · #1 May 24th, 2008, 06:45 PM

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.

Fyron · #2 May 24th, 2008, 09:44 PM

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.

Randallw · #3 May 24th, 2008, 09:59 PM

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.

Romulus68 · #4 May 26th, 2008, 10:11 PM

Quote:

Randallw said:
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.

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?

Fyron · #5 May 27th, 2008, 02:55 PM

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

Romulus68 · #6 May 29th, 2008, 10:27 PM

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.

Fyron · #7 May 30th, 2008, 03:24 AM

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).

Randallw · #8 May 30th, 2008, 05:56 AM

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

. At least I have a spare GB if in future I upgrade to 64 bit.

Fyron · #9 May 30th, 2008, 03:48 PM

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

Romulus68 · #10 June 5th, 2008, 08:27 PM

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.