A week ago I was hit with a virus and couldn't find my VISTA recovery disk. I was forced to use an old XP home edition disk. This has been a week of hell. None stop crashes and a major drop in fps. Crashes including but not limited to memory access, memory could not be read, simple just crashes to the desktop to Blue screen of death, and so on. While using vista I always wondered what everyone was talking about with low fps. Always assumed they just ran Empires on a crappy pc. But I guess it is more of a operating system issue. As with Vista I averaged about a 86-112 fps with XP 8-39 fps. This is with all drivers up to date as possible even tried different older versions of drivers. I think I am going back to vista. (91c.930): Access violation - code c0000005 (first/second chance not available) eax=1d270000 ebx=00000000 ecx=00000007 edx=7c90e514 esi=0c452489 edi=00000654 eip=7c90e514 esp=0012c544 ebp=0012c554 iopl=0 nv up ei pl zr na pe nc cs=001b ss=0023 ds=0023 es=0023 fs=003b gs=0000 efl=00000246
For some people XP might be fine. But people with XP having issues should consider downgrading to VISTA.
Vista has almost every Win 7 patch there is. XP on the other hand is 10 years old shiny Windows 2000.
To be honest if I could get drivers for my hardware for windows 98 that would be my choice for Operating system. Almost everything for 7 or vista can be tweaked into XP. The problem is drivers. Tho windows 7 looks nice and seems more stable then vista....A lot of programs I use are not compatible yet and I do not feel like multi booting.
What kind of programs aren't compatible with Windows 7? Seriously, XP is now 10 years old. I can't think of any program that hasn't updated, or at the very least, wouldn't run in compatibility mode.
I use flash programmers a lot. The programs I use was designed to run on 98/XP and are already very unstable. There are newer programs that do the same things as the ones I use but they tend to error more when flashing memory. The older programs for me seem to do a flawless job.
I'm still using xp like a boss, going to upgrade to the latest windows when it stops getting security updates (which I think is in like 2013 or something) or when a new windows will come out, which might be around the same time. Empires runs pretty smoothly on xp for me.
Somone gave me a 6 month trial version of windwos 7 ENTERPRISE x64. I installed it last night. I just started doing all the updates and driver downloads. I will see if my fps in empires gos up.
I get the same fps with windows 7 but, the moment I went to punch somone, It froze the HL engine and it did not crash. I had to kill it. Poor thing, broke my heart to have to put it down but, I moved on and got a new one.
Yes....it crashes the programs. What I use is a program that is dependent on 6 other programs to emulate a serial port connection.As no new computer comes with serial ports no new operating system really supports serial port interface. The emulated drivers make massive conflicts. So even in a virtual environment you would still have driver conflict.
Cheap Serial port PCI cards Cheap Serial port PCI express cards there are also cheap serial to usb adapters on the market and if you invest your money in a gigabyte mainboard, you can order serial port adapters and brackets for your mainboard for free, if you need them. It just costed me ONE e-mail to their great support. EDIT: Cheap serial port brackets
I have a few of the usb ones. They are not as good. They tend to brick modems more.The problem is with 98, xp, and some what with vista you can tweak drivers more to work around conflicts. next to imposable with getting the old emulated drivers to work with windows 7. Even with Vista I had to disable 50% of my hardware. By disable I mean open the case and unhook connections. Most people that flash modems now used the usb. But my way I am able to flash and diagnose a modem that is running. This allows me full access to all information.
Enterprise is just Ultimate in volume. I work at a public library that employs under 20 people and we run Win7 Enterprise.
I recently started working at a huge gypsum producing company. We just started planing on getting a more homogeneous infrastructure with 7 x64 prof., server 2008, office 2010 and HD monitors everywhere. Nevertheless some production controlling crap will have to stay NT 4.0 in order to avoid any possible trouble. We'll get over 80 new office 2010 licenses, 43 TS 2008 licenses, 28 new ThinClients, 2 or 3 new Servers, 19 normal PCs.... Oldest active piece of crap is an AMD Duron 1300+ :D