Windows Vista Experience

Well… at work this week we decided it was time for me to get a new workstation (I do engineering using Pro Engineer); my last workstation we built using an AMD Athlon 64 and it has been an awesome machine; after looking at pricing ofbuilding our own, we thought we would give buying one a try instead of building one. The only reason we thought of buying was is that we took a machine that one other guy at work had bought for a home PC, it was an HP Pavilion; it uses an athlon 64 x2 4600 many steps faster than my two year old PC we had built. I threw a copy of Pro Engineer on his machine to see just how well it would run it (we were more interested in how the on board graphics would run) well lets just say it was a screamer… the thing performed awesome, this machine was bought a couple of months ago and had Windows XP on it and I think it came with an free upgrade option to Windows Vista that he had never used.

We started this week out heading down to the local Best Buy and picking up the same exact machine, an AMD Athlon 64 x2 6400, 2 gig of ram - 320 gig hard drive - dvd Burner - on board 6150LE graphics just like the machine I had tested, the only difference being that this one came with Windows Vista Home Premium. I unloaded it and set it up at my desk thinking I would move my Pro Engineer License and all my data to it and be rockin; BZZZZZZ wrong answer thanks for playing… I had never really seen Vista before so it was a cool learning experience, I will say that the interface isn’t bad the areo glass looked okay, I’m more of a simple guy than all the flashy stuff but it to me anyway looked good and less “cartoony” than OS X (that mac guy disagreed with me) but this is where my positive things about Vista stops, I booted up and told it some simple info and it was on the internet/network no problems , it went out and downloaded some updates and upon reboot it stopped, so I hard re-booted it and it fired up and was all happy, so I played a little learning the interface a little bit.

I grabbed the Pro Enginner cd’s and loaded it up on the new workstation, loaded fine and getting the license up and running was fine, so I copied so cad files over to the new machine and fired Pro E up, opened the CAD models up to see the performance, or in this case the lack thereof; the graphics were just horrible, well over the years I knew that there is a possiblity that there might be a new graphics driver for it, so I found a much newer one on the HP website and updated it (the update process was flawless and easy) I rebooted after loading the driver and re-fired my program and the graphics were just and crappy as before, in my business I’d say not usable.

I did a bunch of looking on the net for info on why this was being as the exact machine with XP on it was fast as they get, and this one in not going to work for us, well come to find out Vista doesn’t support OpenGL Graphics (what Pro Engineer uses) instead it runs OpenGL on a layer of direct3D (Microsofts graphics system) the reading I have done on OpenGL performance on Vista is a 50% reduction in speed from XP… well this is worthless. for the normal home user it may be fine but for running the software we use its just not going to work. The hardware had all the power and toys we wanted for a great price (around $700) so I took a seat of Windows XP and thought I load that on it and all would be good… not the case in the middle of loading XP it stopped and I had to hard reboot and it came baack and continued the install process until the same point and stopped again; I continuted this for a while and call no joy… Now before the Apple Zealots fall over laughing I have to say I have loaded Windows XP far over 100 times on about every kind of hardware there is and never had a problem NEVER… so I’m not sure if this machine has a hardware issue also along with Vista being a heaping steaming pile of shit, but after hours of screwing with this machine it was loaded back in the box and taken back to Best Buy for a full refund, they asked their fair share of questions upon return but all in all took good care of us. We are now getting a bunch of spec’s rounded up to once again build our own machine instead of buying one (this was our first attempt at buying a machine in many many years).

I will say the Vista thing reminds me of OS X 10.2…. its just not done yet along with the hardware companies haven’t caught up with writing drivers for everything yet. Give it a year and it will be rock solid it took OS X a year or so to get to where I think it was “Done” and it took that long for Windows XP too…. all I can say is I’m not sure who to blame, Microsoft for Vista or HP for shipping a piece of shit?

here are a couple other links I have found:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/01/29/xp-vs-vista/page7.html

http://worldcadaccess.typepad.com/blog/2007/01/vista_runs_cad_.html