General Discussion

I spend the better day of yesterday installing this OS and to my surprise, a lot of basic function stopped working. One of the major ones is that surfing the Internet with either IE or Firefox is incredibly slow. I can't even access my Hotmail account anymore and several other websites like Adobe doesn't show any graphics (or very few of them). I have no trouble accessing Hotmail through my dads XP-setup though so what the hell is wrong? Very often i get a "Server not found" error on other sites.

One other thing is driver support... oh my god!! I have had some problems let me tell you. I use a somewhat older sound card called Terratec DMX  6Fire 24/96 and they do not even have any official drivers for either 64-bit or Vista. I managed to find some kind of beta but now my sound is randomly jumping in volume, very annoying.

So just of the top of your head... what can i do to improve Vista and basic functions like surfing - i'm going crazy here!?! I really would like to stick with this 64-bit system since i have 4 gb of ram where 1 gb would be useless if had to revert back to XP 32-bit...

Originally posted by hdnine

I spend the better day of yesterday installing this OS and to my surprise, a lot of basic function stopped working. One of the major ones is that surfing the Internet with either IE or Firefox is incredibly slow. I can't even access my Hotmail account anymore and several other websites like Adobe doesn't show any graphics (or very few of them). I have no trouble accessing Hotmail through my dads XP-setup though so what the hell is wrong? Very often i get a "Server not found" error on other sites.

One other thing is driver support... oh my god!! I have had some problems let me tell you. I use a somewhat older sound card called Terratec DMX  6Fire 24/96 and they do not even have any official drivers for either 64-bit or Vista. I managed to find some kind of beta but now my sound is randomly jumping in volume, very annoying.

So just of the top of your head... what can i do to improve Vista and basic functions like surfing - i'm going crazy here!?! I really would like to stick with this 64-bit system since i have 4 gb of ram where 1 gb would be useless if had to revert back to XP 32-bit...

The trick to things like old sound cards is to figure out the Audio Chipset it uses, and install the drivers froma company that uses that chipset and has official drivers. (For example if your card is using ALC880, use a Realtek driver for ALC 880)  - Look up your sound card on the web to figure out what chip it is using.

As for your performance, a couple of things. 
1) Install SP1 as soon as if you can if you haven't already.
2) Give Vista a day. It optimizes and indexes and tries to learn how you use your computer. Once this all catches up, it will not only be as fast as your previous OS, but faster.
3) Also check your other drivers, make sure you have the latest Mainboard chipset drivers, HD controller drivers, Video drivers, etc.  (Especially the video drivers, as the included ATI, NVidia, Intel drivers on the Vista DVD are crap.)
4) Don't turn off stuff just because some geek site will tell you to. This is the biggest problem of performance issues, as most of the geek sties don't have a clue, especially when it comes to architectual nature of Vista.  

For example, leave UAC on, once you get software installed, you won't ever see it, and with the UAC FS level driver, Vista runs faster with UAC on.

Also leave Aero/Glass on, it allows the 3D portion of the GPU pick up the drawing functions of a lot of things from decompressing and displaying bitmaps faster, to rendering fonts faster, to even rending older GDI functions faster.

Even for gaming, if you run your game in a Windows, Leaving Aero/Glass on is often faster because Vista is in control of a shared texture that writes directly to the video card, and can be more efficient than the game handling this itself as most games are assuming they are writing to an XP style video driver which is significantly different than Vista's WDDM.

If you still have performance problems after a day or two, you have a problem. Test your RAM, BIOS settings, etc. Get techie if you have to, or get a techie friend to help you. (You can find BIOS settings for your mainboard on the web.)

Vista x64, especially with 4GB of RAM, will run faster than XP or Vista 32bit....

Good Luck

Jesus Christ, i am so tired of this Vista thing...

It seems that Vista has every single one of my directories tagged as read-only which means that i can't save anything onto my computer. I tried changing that but it resets back automatically everytime. The whole thing about extra security is just bullshit as i can't do anything with my machine right now...

What are the "accounts" for anyway? I have administrator rights but still i cannot do anything?!? When i try to change something, a pop-up appears asking for approvement. When i left click and chose save file as, it tells me i cannot save the file to that directory because the properties are set wrong. When i try and change them they change back... ARGH!!!!!!

And yes... i need to install Flash Player in order to view certain content at web sites, but do you even think i can access the download...? Nope! Adobe's website is in pure HTML and the exe file needed is on one of their FTP servers which i can't seem to access.

have you tried using the 32-bit Internet Explorer integrated in Vista x64?

Tough luck. I'd say giving up 1GB of ram for a problem free computer is worth it. But then also, you must have the knowledge to keep it problem free. Thanks for reading :-)

i just installed vista x64 too and it's been pretty smooth sailing so far. i installed it on another hardrive so i can dual boot with xp, but i'm finding myself in vista more and more...

the adobe issue.. have you reinstalled flash ?

also hotmail is also integrated into live mail...sort of like a universal outlook program. It should have come with Vista (if not its free to download) and integrates your system with hotmail...its quite nice. Not as powerful as outlook though....think of it as Outlook Lite