5punk

I found this: http://windowssecrets.com/comp/070215/#story1 page quite useful.

It describes how you can extend the activation grace period to up to 120 days in case you're still not quite sold, but also has info on how you can enter a legitimate key ahead of time and horse it to activate (-ato), to avoid it bitching every time it can't talk to MS because your virus defs are updating at startup or whatever and carps on about RPC servers not being available.

I've considered trying this a few times, but there's not enough DX10 games out to make me bother.

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:I've considered trying this a few times, but there's not enough DX10 games out to make me bother.

Indeed, I own approximately zero myself. I run it on a second partition and dual-boot. It actually does a reasonable job at LoTRO, but most other games I've tried are all of the fail.

Don't. touch. Fista. with. a. fucking. BARGE POLE! (If you're a gamer )

Srsly. I had nothing but problems with most of my games. Age of Empires 3, Ablatross 18, Trickster (Couldn't even play it), Half Life 2 (CS and most things were fine, however the story mode was prone to blue screening) and there were a few more problems with other games now and again. Hamachi also had a few problems too.

Also, the drivers out currently are not up to scratch, which is kind of to be expected, but its annoying when the sound drivers are default and are at their most primitive and ATi Drivers only supporting 1024 x 768 as a max resolution is a bastard.

These problems may not occur for everyone, as everyone has different chipsets and shit, which have different drivers of which the drivers may be causing a few the said problems for the games. However, I do know for a fact that the problems with Albatross 18 and Trickster rely on the security they use, which is not compatible with Fista.

Fista itself as an O.S. is definitely a step up from XP in many ways and is far more flexible then XP. I would still be using Fista now but due to the fuck ups with games, I've emigrated back to XP as everything I want to do/play is supported.

Conclusion: Fista is good but shit for playing games at the moment. Stick with XP, 'if it is not broken, don't fix it.'

TezzRexx wrote:ATi Drivers only supporting 1024 x 768 as a max resolution is a bastard.

That's probably just an ATI issue narf, nvidia certainly have been neglecting XP for Fista Driver releases.

However, I don't know this for sure.

So, tomorrow (probably) I'll install Fista on the gonk and test it with my 8800 and 7900, all the usual benchmarks etc.

Oh noes I'm using teh fista! It doesn't really make any difference as I'm just surfing at the moment, plus it's dual boot for experimental purposes. Someone gave me a super-double-secret h4xord 2 teh m4x edition, caek included.

Saw Halo 2 was out to join Shadowrubbish as a Fista-only game.

I wouldn't have bothered buying it (teh Fist), but I get ultimate edition CDs and infinitely-valid keys from work, so it'd be daft not to give it a whirl.

Still no real benefit, other than when some games crash with what would have been a blue screen and reset in XP, in Fista it only crashes to desktop. Unfortunately crashes happen far more often. I'm not running anything in XP-compatibility mode, because frankly there's no actual point - I have XP for reals as my main partition.

I've still not gotten around to fista, It was failing to get into the second bit of the install (after the reboot)


On the other hand, apparently some specially optimised dell ome install discs are floating about, usually that sort of volume key doesn't get revoked. or need activation. so I've heard anyway

yeah there are OEM disks around. The problem is they look for an OEM bios, and if they cant find it, they dont work.
If you have a particular motherboard, or a particular haircut and depending on the weather in paris you can apparently trick them into thinking you have the matching bios. I've not ventured into it.

ProfHawking wrote:yeah there are OEM disks around. The problem is they look for an OEM bios, and if they cant find it, they dont work.

Read between the lines


I'm pretty certain it's my machine (and it's weirdy config) rather than the disc. might test on tekoki later.

edit: turns out like 100% of the people reporting success with this are dell users now

By the way, it's not just games that you might have problems with.

So far, on the test for the company I'm working for now, only 2 of our 23 in-house applications will work straight off, plus 2 out of 5 other applications we use will not work with Fista.

Also, if anybody is thinking of using Office 2007, FORGET IT, it is absolutely sh*te! Plus there are more incompatability issues with previous verison of Office than there is enough room to type here!!!

Fista does look good (even though it EATS system resource), and is more flexible, but I can't see any real advantage to it over installing the Fista skins for XP!

Just go for Linux Redhat Enterprise WS running X windows!!! You can run XP and Fista together then! (Although it did take about a week to setup!!!)

Squinty

SquinteyeMckneecap wrote:Also, if anybody is thinking of using Office 2007, FORGET IT, it is absolutely sh*te!

Not this. I actually really like it. It's definitely pretty to look at, and once you get used to it I think it's a bit easier to use than the previous versions.
That said, Word 2007 has been giving me the rage today due to its repeated crashes when I try to produce Postscript with embedded fonts from anything except the first page of a document. In other words, no PDFs and no printing except to PCL printers.

It does look prettier, but it's bulkier (as if Office wasn't bulky enough), more un-reliable and Microsoft have seemed to forget all about legacy with this release. Forget about your Access databases and scripts working, start re-writing them now!!!

And it might be quicker to use when you've got used to it, but most of the users here haven't got used to 2003 yet!!!

For home it might be OK, for corporate use it's about as helpful as a paper mack.

Squinty

SquinteyeMckneecap wrote:It does look prettier, but it's bulkier (as if Office wasn't bulky enough), more un-reliable and Microsoft have seemed to forget all about legacy with this release. Forget about your Access databases and scripts working, start re-writing them now!!!

And it might be quicker to use when you've got used to it, but most of the users here haven't got used to 2003 yet!!!

For home it might be OK, for corporate use it's about as helpful as a paper mack.

Squinty

Not had a problem with Access backwards-compatability personally (and if you're using Access for corporate, you've got bigger problems ).

Yup, we do use it here (inherited, not my choice, the past IT Manager's fault) and yup we are having problems with backwards compatability (loads of 'em).

Think we'll just be skipping 2007, the company wouldn't invest the training in getting the all their goldfish users trained up on it anyway!!!

Squinty

I *Finally* Got (lovely dell oem) Fista to work.

Turns out that Fista will put its boot-manager thing onto the first drive in the drives list (which on both of my working machines is *not* the first boot or windows drive) As such, my windows xp was taking over.

Was just a case of pulling all my other HDDs for the install process, moderately annoying, but not a huge inconvenience (unlike the hours and hours of testing and googling)

This seems as good a place as any for this, I've done some quick playtests with a few of the games most commonly played by 5punk.

2142: About the same, feels a little smoother.
ArmA: same lousy performance I got under xp, 1.08 patch helps a lot.
BEEF: seems fine, maybe slower than xp by a hair, totally playable.
CoD:UO: *WAY* better than xp (note: I haven't been getting over 20fps in cod under xp recently) (also, UO installed easily, unlike under xp64 and 2k3)
CS:S: fine, about the same as XP. (sounds sound a little meatier though)
STALKER: v1.000 crashed. v1.0004 seemed fine, again, perhaps a tad slower
Guildwars: Seems considerably faster under Fista.

Not a game:

Nzb-o-matic Plus: downloads are considerably slower, if anything is gonna be a deal breaker, this is.


And now for my thoughts on the matter:
This was not a scientific test, my observations are on my machine, going from oldish (but very functional) XP install, to new Fista install.

I wonder if some of the speed difference is because Fista doesn't do hardware sound (if I was doing a proper head to head test, I'd use onboard sound)

It also seems to me like nvidia are *really* pushing the 8800 drivers for fista ahead of the windows xp ones.


So far I've seen nothing that makes me want to go back to xp, and if I were to do so, I'd certainly keep Fista and dual boot.


*This Post contains really terrible english, I don't care.

Dr. kitteny berk wrote:*This Post contains really terrible english, I don't care.

Neither do most other people and you shouldn't feel the need to add this caveat.

Anyway, this is good news. It sounds like the time to switch is drawing nearer. I quite liked it from what I saw but couldn't be bothered to reinstall all my apps/games to do a proper test.

spoodie wrote: Neither do most other people and you shouldn't feel the need to add this caveat.

Pffft, turnabout is always fair play.

Right now I'd say Fista is worth a go if you can be arsed to set it up to dual boot, and you're willing to lose a little performance while gaming under Fista.

However, my main reason for switching (apart from xp going horribly wrong) was because nvidia seem to be neglecting the 8800 a little under windows xp.