How's Fista these days?

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » August 4th, 2008, 10:07

Especially in relation to ATI drivers.

I'm planning on having some serious issues with the 4GB limit soon

spoodie · Post by **spoodie** » August 4th, 2008, 10:17

I'm on the verge of switching. I need a new motherboard and the OS could do with a refresh so it's got to be Fista OEM time soon. Probably.

buzzmong · Post by **buzzmong** » August 4th, 2008, 10:22

Berk, do you even NEED more than 4 gig system RAM for what you do?

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » August 4th, 2008, 10:26

buzzmong wrote:Berk, do you even NEED more than 4 gig system RAM for what you do?

who mentioned system ram?

buzzmong · Post by **buzzmong** » August 4th, 2008, 10:35

Planning on crossfiring 2 (or 3) 512 ati boards or something?

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » August 4th, 2008, 10:36

not exactly.

Just a 4870X2, or a pair of 4870 1GBs.

Nickface · Post by **Nickface** » August 4th, 2008, 13:48

I've been enjoying Fista for a few months now, though I'm an nVidia user. I love it a lot and everything runs smooth. I only have 4gb of RAM though.

Lateralus · Post by **Lateralus** » August 4th, 2008, 14:46

To be honest, other than asking my permission for stuff too much, I've had no real problems with Fista at work. Can't see any benefits to changing from XP at home, but no complaints either. That said, I use it on a laptop for internet, email and word processing, so couldn't comment on how well it works with games etc.

Post by **FatherJack** » August 4th, 2008, 15:40

Aren't we talking Fista 64 here? In which case it's okay but you do have to fuck about with a lot of things, some stuff just won't play and you'll be using no-frills drivers and dual-booting to do other stuff. No knowledge of ATi drivers under it.

spoodie · Post by **spoodie** » August 4th, 2008, 15:43

This is true. It amazes me that Windows is so far behind on the 64 bit up-take. It should have been the standard years ago.

Post by **Joose** » August 4th, 2008, 15:47

Im on Fista 32 here, and have no complaints really. Ive got XP dual booting with it, and Ive not actually used XP since installing Fista.

Post by **Dr. kitteny berk** » August 4th, 2008, 15:48

Unfortunately, I suspect my options are Fista64 or XP64.

Neither of which seem particularly desirable.

And I'm not a great fan of that

rebooting thing

Stoat · Post by **Stoat** » August 4th, 2008, 15:53

From what I've heard, Vista64 is the best flavour.

Post by **Joose** » August 4th, 2008, 16:04

Joose Snr has Fista64, and his only complaint is an inability to make 64 bit IE play nicely with Flash. Firefox and flash works fine though.

Hehulk · Post by **Hehulk** » August 4th, 2008, 16:22

How's Fista for games?

Post by **deject** » August 4th, 2008, 16:27

From what I've been hearing Fista 64-bit is just about OK. I'm thinking about migrating myself soon. I looked at the release notes for the latest Catalyst driver set and it didn't seem like there were too many known issues, so I think you should be OK as far as that's concerned.

Akiakaiu · Post by **Akiakaiu** » August 4th, 2008, 16:38

I haven't had any problems with games and vista32.

Post by **Joose** » August 4th, 2008, 16:39

Akiakaiu wrote:I haven't had any problems with games and vista32.

Akiakaiu · Post by **Akiakaiu** » August 4th, 2008, 21:15

Wait! I lied! Popcap games in Steam have an error when I exit, but it does not effect anything other then I have to press the little close button on the pop-up box. Game saves fine, ect....

As for the whole Fista experience, I'm liking it, I have no problems what so ever, though having to enter the admin password for whenever you want to do something (read: most things) gets a bit old, but it stops the youngins from hurting my baby.

Post by **FatherJack** » August 5th, 2008, 7:33

Joose wrote:Joose Snr has Fista64, and his only complaint is an inability to make 64 bit IE play nicely with Flash. Firefox and flash works fine though.

They haven't finished the 64-bit IE yet - there's a note either when you run it or in the help saying they haven't ported everything to it, which is why the default is the 32-bit version. I use the 32-bit version of Firefox 2 without many issues.

As far as my experience with Fista 64 goes, most games are okay, but any with certain copy-protection won't run at all. Some like being run as administrator, yet some will only run as a user. Some games won't install at all, but play fine if you install them to a shared drive from a 32-bit OS.
Very common is a winsock32.dll error which pops up exactly nine times when starting a game, which then runs fine - it's caused by XFire which additionally can't detect if you are playing a game with a native 64-bit exe.

Apps are a different matter. Music and video creation stuff doesn't play nice, nor does networky stuff. I've found an NZB replacement in NewsLeecher, but nothing to replace GetRight yet. Big-name stuff works okay, NOD32 has a 64-bit version and Everest and GameShadow surprised me by working straight away - as they have been flaky for me under 32-bit Fista.

Also http://www.start64.com/index.php pointed me to an updated (but still, I think, beta) version of the X-Fi driver, which is relevant to my interests. Had WoW crash on sound on me the other night - WoW, FFS - that's never crashed on anything for me before.

32-bit Fista ran everything for me, except Dark Messiah.