Wow... first my gaming mags started to look like a published advertisement, then G4 (techtv back in the day) switched from technology and games to... well a whole bunch of crap, and now my favorite video game website makes a list that looks and feels like an advertisement to best buy... I'm sorry but I can't trust the gaming media no more!
I bought the home basic upgrade of windows vista on the 30th. It was only 99 bucks and the store had a deal where they gave me a free 512mb flash drive.... so all in all not a bad deal. I wanted to try it out because I'm a geek and i got something free! Granted, some people may not like the home basic version of vista (mainly because it seems striped down), but I bought it because I have no use for media center capabilities and I could care less about the Aero Glass interface. My biggest fear was that all my hardware wouldn't work well enough (It is an old AMD 64 3200+, Radeon x1300 pro video card [AGP port.. and only a 250 watt power supply is why i have a low end card], and 1 gb of ram). However, I can say right now that I like it better than my old xp instillation... all my accessories work fine and I have not ran into any problem yet. I'm using a 1gb flash drive for Microsoft's ready boost and I do not know if that is why vista seems faster than xp when surfing the internet or having Open Office open faster when I need to type a paper for college. As for games, I wanted to test out compatibility for my games. First off WoW works just as fine in vista as it did for xp. Same is true for FarCry. However, I wanted to see what about old games... I'm talkin' games that were designing for 98 and using a direct x 8 interface. So I tested out Jedi Knight II... and it works just fine in 1280x1024 resolution. I want to try and install an old dos game, but i just can't find any of those disks :-( I can also say that my Pinnacle PCTV HD PRO Stick (tv tuner) works fine with pinnacle's beta drivers and beta media center software. Also, my M-Audio keystation (midi keyboard) works fine and the software that i use to make music (music maker and sound studio II) works just as good as they did in xp. But all in all, I would say if your a geek and likes to play with new technology (or love the Mac OS X but can't stand how there is a lack of games out for that OS) then by all means upgrade to vista. But if your content with your xp box, then you have no reason to upgrade at the moment.
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