Is it my settings or Vista

[KoboldKiller]

My wife and I basically have the exact same machines. The only difference is my system is newer has a newer vid card and Vista. My wife has Windows XP. Now, we have a fiberoptic connection and run side by side. I have lag and long load times she does not. So I ask is it my windows settings (the video settings for the game are identical) or does Vista just suck? If anyone has any ideas I'm open. I had to set the game properties to run as admin and compatible to XP (there is not a Vista choice). I have the vid quality set to low. I have updated my vid card drivers (GeForce 6150e something like that I'm at work). I have 1gig Ram 2.4ghz AMD64 processor 128mb vid card (same as my wife's).

[Altumus]

I would post your dxdiag file that would help us identify any possible issues.

[StanC]

My wife and I basically have the exact same machines. The only difference is my system is newer has a newer vid card and Vista. My wife has Windows XP. Now, we have a fiberoptic connection and run side by side. I have lag and long load times she does not. So I ask is it my windows settings (the video settings for the game are identical) or does Vista just suck? If anyone has any ideas I'm open. I had to set the game properties to run as admin and compatible to XP (there is not a Vista choice). I have the vid quality set to low. I have updated my vid card drivers (GeForce 6150e something like that I'm at work). I have 1gig Ram 2.4ghz AMD64 processor 128mb vid card (same as my wife's).

Vista is resource hog. Takes up a lot more resources then XP. That could be alot of your issue.

[flatlyne2001]

Vista is resource hog. Takes up a lot more resources then XP. That could be alot of your issue.

Every new OS is a resource hog compared the it's predecessor, that being said yes 1gb of ram is a bit low for running vista.

If your board can handle it I would suggest at least 2gb for vista and stable gaming.

flatlyne2001

[KoboldKiller]

I did go back and disable "indexing" as well as turning of "aero" and it has improved. I will more than likely add another gig RAM. Thank you for your help.

[Rouge]

I did go back and disable "indexing" as well as turning of "aero" and it has improved. I will more than likely add another gig RAM. Thank you for your help.

When I installed Vista on my computer, I did a Google search for "vista performance tweaks" and read through atleast a half a dozen pages implimenting whichever ones sounded good. I also purchased a couple new pieces of hardware.

Windows XP Sp2
ASUS P4P800 SE Motherboard
Pentium 4 3.0
1.5 GB Ram
GeForce 6600 w/256 Ram
120 GB SATA Hard Drive
SoundMAX Sound Card (Built on Motherboard)

Vista Home Basic
ASUS P4P800 SE Motherboard
Pentium 4 3.0
3 GB Ram
GeForce 7900 w/256 Ram
120 GB SATA Hard Drive
250 GB SATA Hard Drive
Soundblaster Audigy (I couldn't get it to work with XP on this Motherboard)


I think with my original hardware my Windows Experience Index was 3.7 with my Video Card as lowest subscore. Now with the new hardware it's 4.2 with the Processor as lowest subscore. From what I heard if you pick up a 2gb flash drive and use it for the Vista Ram Boost it will help too, but I've not done that yet.

[flatlyne2001]

From what I heard if you pick up a 2gb flash drive and use it for the Vista Ram Boost it will help too, but I've not done that yet.

I toyed with a thumbdrive from a friend and it works pretty slick, and for $20-30 it's a really cheap option.

reminds me need to pick one up to boost the 4gb I already have installed LOL

flatlyne2001

[blaten22]

I toyed with a thumbdrive from a friend and it works pretty slick, and for $20-30 it's a really cheap option.

reminds me need to pick one up to boost the 4gb I already have installed LOL

flatlyne2001

Let me guess, you set your USB drive to act as your Virtual Memory?

[Theboz]

I toyed with a thumbdrive from a friend and it works pretty slick, and for $20-30 it's a really cheap option.

reminds me need to pick one up to boost the 4gb I already have installed LOL

flatlyne2001


Its called Readyboost and you have to have Vista and not all 2gig or 4gig Usb drives are compatible and you must have a USB 2.0. device should have an access time of 1ms or less and few other requirements.

Also, You only notice major difference if you only have half gig of memory in or computer. If you only have 512k and you are running Vista, you are not playing DDO.

If you have 2gigs or more in your computer you will not notice much of improvement to warrent using it, but it wont hurt.

Also it wont make your computer faster, it will only improve start up times on programs you use most often, meaning, when you click on DDO, you might notice a fraction of a sec difference as to when you can put your password in and log on after that you will not notice anything else.

[Karch]

Its called Readyboost and you have to have Vista and not all 2gig or 4gig Usb drives are compatible and you must have a USB 2.0. device should have an access time of 1ms or less and few other requirements.

Also, You only notice major difference if you only have half gig of memory in or computer. If you only have 512k and you are running Vista, you are not playing DDO.

If you have 2gigs or more in your computer you will not notice much of improvement to warrent using it, but it wont hurt.

Also it wont make your computer faster, it will only improve start up times on programs you use most often, meaning, when you click on DDO, you might notice a fraction of a sec difference as to when you can put your password in and log on after that you will not notice anything else.

Actually, for a lot of players ReadyBoost can cure Vista memory handling problems. Just having the extra memory that's treated as ram will keep Vista from crashing to desktop in many cases. Also, it offers a massive difference when installing and defragmenting. The larger the files are you're working with, the more increase you'll notice.

[Montrose]

Actually, for a lot of players ReadyBoost can cure Vista memory handling problems. Just having the extra memory that's treated as ram will keep Vista from crashing to desktop in many cases. Also, it offers a massive difference when installing and defragmenting. The larger the files are you're working with, the more increase you'll notice.

Don't you mean it will keep dndlauncher.exe from crashing to the desktop? I doubt it is the OS itself that is crashing, as Vista is quite resilient, particularly to OOM situations.

Vista should, if compromised to a large extent (usually a driver issue), head into a reboot cycle. When it reboots and you login it should prompt you with some toast to tell you how to resolve the problem in the future (if the problem is known and KB'd).

[Karch]

Don't you mean it will keep dndlauncher.exe from crashing to the desktop? I doubt it is the OS itself that is crashing, as Vista is quite resilient, particularly to OOM situations.

Actually, it's between the two. When Vista registers a program as using too many resources (DDO does this quite often, by Vista's standards) and there isn't enough space left for the system to cache all the extra data that it requires, it'll shut down processes, often giving little or no information directly to you (the end user). So you're right, Vista is much more robust than XP was, but at the cost of pushing your applications to the limit. Increasing your system resources is the only way to create a happy medium between the two, and ReadyBoost is a cheap but effective way to do that.