Well, color me surprised!

I don't know how to say this, so I'll just come right out with it - I'm installing Vista.

I'm building a new machine, and I want to try it out. I want to be able to use DirectX 10, to get the most out of my new hardware. I've been doing a bit of research, and it seems that Service Pack 1 fixed a lot of the performance and stability issues that have plagued Vista's public image.

I didn't have a very high opinion of it either, even recently (as in, last week). Then something clicked. I've only used pre-installed versions of vista on HP's and Dells. Now, the basic operating system doesn't change between brands, but the extra shitware that the OEM's load their machines down with can have an enormous impact on the performance of a new system.

I'll give you a quick overview of the situation as it stands right now, starting with my shiny new hardware:

DFI LANParty DK "Dark" motherboard - Socket AM2+ with an AMD 790FX chipset
AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ - the new 45nm chip at 3.1GHz
4GB of OCZ DDR2-800
500GB Western Digital Caviar Black 7200RPM SATA drive with 32MB cache
PC Power & Cooling 610 watt power supply
XFX GeForce 6800GT (temporary)

Last but not least, I've got a Zotac GeForce GTX260+ card on order.
This is the centerpiece of the build, as I found out a long time ago that the video card has the biggest impact on gaming performance. This card has the newer second iteration of the GTX260 core, with 216 stream processors instead of 192. Its core clock speed has also been increased from 575 to 650MHz.

All of this awesomeness is wrapped up in an Antec 300 ATX case with 4 120mm fans and 1 140mm fan to keep everything cool without creating a lot of noise. I've modified the case with a window to show off its powerful innards, and some UV lights to make the motherboard's UV-reactive plastics glow.

On the software side, I've got Vista Business 32-bit installed. I chose Business because, well, that's what they were offering as a "student edition" at the school bookstore the last time I wanted to buy an OS disc. It seems to have a good selection of features without being unnecessarily bloated.

It sees 3.25GB of my 4GB of DDR2 (a limitation of 32-bit operating systems) and it seems to be quite stable. I've made some preliminary performance tweaks, as follows:

Turned off system restore - it only serves to slow down the machine and take up extra hard drive space. If things ever get to the point where I have to use such a feature, I'm more inclined to re-install my OS. Your mileage may vary.

Turned off disk indexing - I've used system search on my machine maybe a dozen times in the last year. It's not worth it to me to deal with my hard disk constantly doing extra shit in the background, I'd much rather use it's snappy speed and ridiculous 32MB cache to load game levels.

Turned off the Windows Sidebar - The analog clock is kind of neat, the RSS reader handy and the CPU meter actually quite useful, but I'd rather have the extra bit of RAM and desktop responsiveness that comes with getting rid of all that crap.

Turned off "transparent glass" - once again, for a gaming machine speed and responsiveness trumps visual goodies on the desktop.

Set page file to a static size - This is mostly to prevent the pagefile from getting fragmented. I don't doubt Vista manages the dynamic pagefile better than XP did (it would be hard to do much worse, to be honest), but I'd just as soon set it and not have to worry about it later.

Turned off UAC - Yes, it's a shiny new security feature, but it's annoying as shit. A word of warning to OS developers: Do NOT make my screen flicker to black every three seconds. It gives me a headache. Also, don't throw up a warning every third time I click on something. Yes, I know Ubuntu does pretty much the same thing, but there are subtle differences that make ALL the difference: instead of the jarring black flicker, Ubuntu transitions to a grey overlay and presents you with a password prompt, rather than a simple "click okay to continue" dialog. This doesn't induce headaches, and it actually adds security rather than annoyance.

There were some surprises, both good and bad. First off, after the performance tweaking it actually seems very responsive and quick. The machine can reboot to a usable desktop in a bit under one minute, and there isn't much of the "windows pause" when opening a menu or starting a program. I'm curious to see how much it slows down as it ages.

The only really bad surprise is that, at idle on a fresh install it uses almost 900MB of system memory. The performance doesn't seem to suffer for it though, surprisingly enough. Just keep this in mind. 2GB is the bare minimum, no matter what it says on the box.

"You have always lived like this"
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