After about four days of using Vista for gaming I decided to switch back to XP. The drivers for my graphics card decided to crap out whenever the settings would change. This means that every time I started a game odd stuff would happen.
One thing that I thought would be better in Vista is the performance of higher end games, namely Crysis. This game pushes every computer to the limits today. With directX 10 I was under the assumption that it would perform better, I was wrong. I get better performance with XP than I ever did with Vista.
The many reason I tell people to continue to use Windows is for gaming as everything else can be done on another OS. This means I see no reason for Vista at this point in time. There will be a time that it does get better, but I do not see it in the near future. XP is the right choice for all Windows users today.
The most annoying problem was that the system and game would fight over the settings. Thus I would see a non-stop flickering of the screen. The only way I could stop this was to hit the fabled control alt delete and bring up the task manager to kill the game.
I reinstalled the drivers from Nvidia to see if that would fix the issue, no luck. Then looked an alternative driver out there called omega. Of course it does not work with Vista. Without any other easy options I was stuck.
The only logical option I saw for fixing this situation was to go with XP. I really did not want to do this, but it was the easiest solution to the problem.
Some people may argue that this problem is not Microsoft’s, but the graphics card vendors. That is partly correct in my eyes. Microsoft changed the way system drivers work in Vista to make them more secure and cause fewer problems. Thus they created a huge mess for some hardware manufacturers, especially in the graphics card arena.
