Vista SP1
 

Ok, so just because I can, and all of the below really happened to me this week I thought I'd share my story and see if anyone else can relate.

I've been running Vista Ultimate since about March of 2007. It took a while to get configured and running how I'd like, and that was no biggy. Compared to XP it didn't seem to hog resources so things were good. Up until about three weeks ago things were fine, I had nothing but good things to say about Vista.

But all of a sudden it caught the Microsoft itch. Unexpected slowdowns started presenting themself, with no viruses, malware, or any of that crap and no new software to report. Actually the speed was only really noticed in Maya, Auto Cad and Photoshop.
Vista seemed to be eating more memory than usual, a LOT more. There was a time in Vista's life when I could run Maya, Photoshop, firefox, and itunes all the the same time (dual monitors is great). And then I got to texturing some stuff in Maya, so I'd create a node and then try to apply a node to say the color of a blinn or lambert, or any attribute. Where a menu should pop up with a list of nodes, I got nothing, and on some good days maya crashed. One day this resolved itself and instead just lagged to death trying to load the menu. And then I soon realized the problem had copied itself to the render globals menu. It would crash maya or LAG to death. Again minor setback/annoyance when it was working. And then I'd try to open an image in photoshop. PS would now crash, or take forever due to heavy memory usage by Vista. All of my open programs combined for a total usage of about 1100 MB photoshop was asking for 200 which should be no problem - I have 3 gigs installed.

So I had to close maya, open photoshop. Close photoshop, open maya. just to make sure things were laying out correctly.

At that point I was ready to go back to XP, but then Microsoft said to me :Why not install service pack 1 for Vista?
I did some googling and found a lot of good talk about SP 1. So I downloaded the - not so surprising - 450 megs worth of it, installed it which again - not so surprisingly - took about an hour and like 8 restarts...?

After all was said and done it asked to restart one more time to make everything pretty. So I granted its final wish and hit the restart now button. I sat at my desk, watching in excitement to see my shiny new vista acting better than ever. Well 1 loading bar goes by, then two. Three, four, five, six and even seven go by. I figure maybe this is normal its trying to get everything all set in stone. Loading bar number 82 goes by (yes, I really wanted to get back to work and counting the load bars seemed to keep me distracted from the fact that windows was now into about 12 minutes of load time).

I wrote down the number of load bars and amount of time I sat there waiting and went to get some food. I came back about ten minutes later and Alas! The load bar was gone, I had progress to just a black screen... So not too long after that it booted into windows. My tablet driver had been screwed around with so I reinstalled that and restarted. This time windows would boot as quick as normal right? Wrong.

27 mind blowing minutes later I was closing tasks as soon as I could trying to quicken the load process just so I could shut the system down and install XP.

So here I stand on XP Pro woth service pack 3 which surprisingly was about 40 megs and took about 13 seconds to install and actually optimized the already awesome XP. For interests sake I did a fresh install of vista on another partition and well rendering results were astounding. A scene which rendered in about 6 and a half minutes on the fresh vista install rendered in only 4 and a half on XP.

As we speak I have autocad, itunes, firefox(obviously), thunderbird, msn, maya, photoshop, and after effects open and I sit here with 400 megs of ram to spare.

From my experience and the numbers I'd recommend XP to all. It was a great upgrade for me:D

Dives for cover in anticipation of pro-Mac OS X and possible even Linux comments swarming this thread... :)


27 minutes just to boot up? I can remember XP taking around 5 minutes on my ancient 8-year old box, which I thought was dreadfully slow, but 27 minutes? On a modern machine? I could watch the Simpsons and come back with time to spare, lol! :)

Ive only run Vista under VMware, seemed ok not really used it though.

To be honest I'm going to keep running XP for about 2-3 years unless theres a really massive reason to upgrade, I also keep toying with the idea of going to linux but theres not a "proper" reason why I would, be more of a pain in the ass to swap, XP has everything that I need, runs nice and stable, never had a problem with it so I've got no reason to change.

im not leaving XP untill windows 7 comes out

I'm running Vista with SP 1 for it on my computer, I would still be on XP pro but I built my new machine I was having issues with the memory so I had to upgrade to a 64 bit OS, Vista seemed like the natural choice.

When I first got it I was cursing the day I had given over my bank card number to pay for it but have worked out how to use it and am now pretty pleased with how it runs.

The only thing that has bugged the crap out of me is that M-Audio isn't making a 64 bit drver for my MIDI control keyboard, hmph!

Me next! Me next!
hehe...

Maybe I'm just one of the lucky ones, but over the last 11 years my hardware guy has been building my Windows machines and renderslaves for me and contrary to a LOT of what we all keep hearing and reading about, I have literally had ZERO issues related to Windows in that whole time.
**See my very wordy attachment for the reason for that:)

Anyhoo, my current machine is setup is as such:

-Windows Vista 64bit Ultimate
-Tyan Tempest i5400XT Dual-Proc Server Motherboard.
-2 Intel Xeon Quad-Core X3220's @ 2.4GHz
-16 gigs of CORSAIR DOMINATOR ram.
-Nvidia Geforce 8800 gts SOFTMODDED to a Quatro 4600:)
-6 500GB SATA Seagate cuda's @ 7200rpm
----2 drives for my 1 Terabyte raid 0 boot array
----4 drives raid 10 for my redundant superfast working array.

I loves me my realtime 2k playback in Fusion, hehe.

The awesome thing is, even after all the periferals and the LianLi case, this rig only cost me about $3050:)

All my renderslaves on my Cube Renderfarm are simple Xp boxes running Intel DualCore procs with 4 gigs of ram and really only a 120gig drive, as a rendernode doesn't need storage, the cheaper drives can suffice:)

So overall, a pretty sweet setup on the cheap:)

Haha Rage, I hope to get enough cash one of these days to build me a system like that. Instead I am usually forced to upgrade a part at a time as my machine needs it.

I know my system was buitla dn optimized for XP, but after working on that for what seems like ever without any problems I somehow crafted up a virus. So I figured I'd format and start clean. I couldn't get XP back to the way it was. So I figured why not optimize and move to Vista? It worked great and I was thrilled. Just recent issues plagued the situation.

As it stands I am looking into upgrading or building a new machine for Vista 64. 64 Bit software has been made available to me (thank god!) and it is looking like I may need it. Plus if I can find financing for a new machine then I can configure this pc into a renderslave along with a few older machines I am getting in the next few weeks. At this point the difference between upgrading my machine and building a bigger better one is only about 700$. So it kinda seems like a logical thing for me to build a new rig all together. If I strip out my hard drives, and dvd burner I can save myself another ~$200 on the new rig.

As for your render slaves, they are simply OS, Ram(how much), video card? network card and a hard drive right?

I haven't found much info on creating render farms for personal use, I found a good article on building one but it doesn't seem to detail those parts in great detail.

Anyways all-in-all if I build a brand new machine it looks like it'll set me back about $1500 for parts with a quad core cpu and 8 gigs of ram. I'll probably also add in $160 for 2 500gb hard drives for raid.

If you get a chance to read my attachment to my last post, you will see why I made the decision not to ever upgrade piece by piece because, well, as folks find out the hard way, it only breeds trouble.
I used to have to wait a VERY long time to save up enough cash but, in the long run, it was WELL worth the wait:)

All it takes is one year of saving $125 bucks from every check, A LOT OF PATIENCE, and you'll have $3000:)

Timing is good too because where I work I "usually" get a yearly raise, and a bonus AND my tax refund all in the same month, so I tend to use that as my year-mark.
Yeah, like I said, I'm NOT a hardware guy so do not take my word for gospel:)
But my farm boxes are setup like so:

- Simple Xp sp2 install
- Cheap Intel DualCore procs
- 2-4 gigs of cheap Corsair or Gskill ram
- A cheap Seagate 120gig SATA boot drive
- Gigabit network built on the mobo.
- I used to do no video at all, but now I've begun adding cheap GeForce 8500GT 512MB 128-bit GDDR2 PCIE @ $67 from Newegg, of corse:)

If you use a remote terminal to access your slaves, such as VNC or RDP (remote desktop connection), the machine you are using to access your slaves is providing the video to see the desktop of each slave.

NOTE: I have since added videocards to my slaves to handle hardware particle rendering.

So, whenever I got about $300-460 bucks or so, I try and add a new slave:)

Read it three times now:P

In the past things have been pretty smooth for me. Though I spent a lot more time buying a proper replacement that was an upgrade.

I can clearly see at this point how waiting to build a new machine is a much better idea as to get a proper performance incrase via upgrades would cost about $800. Where as building a new machine that would be that much better than my "upgrade" would only cost about $600 more.

I'd love to have a main system like yours, but then again if I ever get into particles or effects I might have to.

Also having a job would help me out, but school first then a job, and then money for a new machine to screw around with in my free-time.

The one annoying thing now is that Vista had such awesome workflow tools built in for Tablet use, and XP doesn't. So I have to drop the pen, type in what I want to type and then pick the pen up again. But hey, I guess I'll have to make it work for now.

Roger that, I figured I had just about all the info I needed but then I find someone with some handy advice! Thanks a bunch rage. Always some helpful stuff seems to spew out of your posts.

Cheers,
Alexander

hehe, yeah, I try to at least drop a nugget or two if I tend to write at least a paragraph, but sometimes its good, and sometimes not:)

Good luck!

Can I ask why you didn't use 10K or 15K rpm drives? Since I would have used them if I was to build a superfast array...

Just read your txt file, its so so true, I've not had any problems, the crashes I get are when I try to do something stupid, so I deserve it! LOL.

Yeah thers a lot of PC building other than slapping components in a box, they need to be matched to get the best performance.

I was aiming at more redundant storage space than spindle-speed back then, but I currently I do have an external fiber raid 10 that is made up of 4 10k Seagate Cheetahs as well.
Sadly Newegg has stopped selling the Cheetah, so I had to order them from Pricegrabber, and I got the Fiber card and enclosure from a friend. Luckily I was able to find 4 74gig 10k cheetahs @ pricegrabber for 70 bucks a piece brand new:) Yeah, same here. The only crashes I have now, if at all, are due to the problems with the software I use, never the OS itself:)

Nice! :)

How fast is the fiber channel?

I first had a 2gig, but my friend sold me a 4gig about 3 months ago.