Sunday, March 18, 2007

Goodbye NVidia

Almost two and a half months after the launch of Vista we don't have fully operational 8800 drivers. In addition, the platform drivers are of questionable quality as well.

This is in my opinion, inexcusable.

There are a number of others who are quite peeved, most notably the forum goers over at the once operational www.nvidiaclassaction.org ( I wonder where the site went? ). Though you can pretty much find a rant just by typing "8800 GTX Vista" into google.

So I've decided that when the R600 rolls out (I'm willing to be a little patient) I'm going to make the switch.

With any luck we will see a motherboard from ATI/AMD for the 4x4 platform sometime soon as well.

I hope that others who have NVidia products and are displeased will choose differently on their next purchases. Short of some sort of legal action, the only way we can show our dissatisfaction is by purchasing another product.

L1N64-SLI WS Ethernet DOA

At least two other readers have had trouble with their on board Ethernet. I'd like to hear from anyone else who has had an issue as well just leave a comment.

A call for comments

Give the compatibility issues I've written about so far, I ask any readers of this blog to post comments about hardware vendors whose hardware works with Vista, or doesn't and any other information that you feel is relevant. At some later date I'll re post with a list featuring the naughty and nice.

Vista Compatibility

Recent events have me pretty ticked off.

I just bought a Logitech Orbit MP camera. A cool little camera with 640x480@30fps and Pan/Zoom/Tilt features as well. I bought it specifically because there is a logo on the box that shows: "Works with Vista". Two vista installs later (32 and 64) it doesn't work with Vista, nor do the latest drivers.

I also had to uninstall the latest version of the 8800 drivers because the nvidia display driver kept crashing after playing W.o.W. for 30 minutes. I'm now back to the Feb. 20th release. Which while it works has some problems. Several are incompatibilty with the Hold Em' game distributed with Vista Ulti and crashes after running DreamScene for more than a few minutes.

Why is it that Samsung has Vista drivers that work with my 4 year old laser printer? And why does a nice little icon show up with my T-Mobile dash? All of my joysticks including my Yoke and Pedals from CH Products work as well.

The things I've read over in the ATI camp indicate that they are pretty happy with their "Vista Experience". And I have to be honest my Laptop has an old school X300 in it, and it's been running Vista since October with not a single instability.

I'm baffled at how companies can release products that are advertised to work with Vista but don't. From what I've been reading, Logitech's track record with software support for their hardware is pretty bad. NVidia has major issues as well.

I would like to see some legal action related to the claims of "compatibilty" I feel that it is really going to be the only way to send a clear message to these companies that it is NOT ok to use us as beta testers.

Thursday, March 1, 2007

Motherboard RMA

I have an RMA into Asus regarding the on-board network card issue. Another reader pointed out he had the same symptoms under xp 64 - I hope that the hardware is broken and not the software. Hopefully they are going to be able to send me a new motherboard so I can just do a swap.

In the mean time I will continue to make due with my little Netgear 1 GbE card.

Virtual Server 2003 R2 and Vista

Just a word of caution, it doesn't work on this machine.

I installed virtual server a couple nights ago. I rebooted, and my machine BSOD'd within 10 minutes of starting up. Periodically it would BSOD and reboot. Whacky. The error was in ndis.sys. Of course "Checking on-line" for a solution yielded nothing. Admittedly Virtual Server 2003 R2 does not feature Vista 64 as one of the compatible operating systems, oh well.

More RAM installed

I got another pair of the Tracers this evening. I popped them in with out a hitch. The system seems a bit more responsive - especially in WoW during the flight from Westfall to Iron Forge (an aerial route in which there are many frequent scene changes) Route the frame rate seems to be better.

Interestingly, the steady state ram usage is now up to about 2 GB.

I'm sure the RAM benchmarks would be pretty high now. Unfortunately I tried to install Sandra a week ago and it doesn't work. No idea why, something about not being able to connect to a database. I wish vendors would test their software with Vista... >:0