Cygon’s Blog

One month ago, I published some personal benchmarks of my AMD system comparing the performance of Windows Vista with that of Windows XP. Back then, I had only run PCMark (where Vista was slightly behind XP, even thought the 3D desktop composition gave it such a high score in GDI alpha blending that Vista’s final score was actually higher).

Now I’m going to run 3DMark 2003 and 3DMark 2006. My gaming rig has changed slightly, the details now are:

• Asus Crosshair (NForce 590 SLI)
• 4GB OCZ DDR2 RAM (EB + EPP, 4-4-3-15, 2T)
• AMD Athlon64 X2 6000+ EE
• Asus EN8800 GTS TOP 512MB (NVidia G92, Factory-OCed)
• Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum
• Western Digital 400 GB SATA drive

XP means Windows XP Professional, x86 version, fresh install with the latest drivers as of January 2008. Vista means Windows Vista Ultimate, x64 version, fresh install with latest drivers as of January 2008, except for the NForce drivers (which cause 40-60 second IDE bus hangs, freezing the system for some time).

Here are the results:

3DMark03

3DMark06

As you can see,  the performance loss due to Windows Vista is negligible.

However, it has cost me a huge amount of my precious spare time just to do a clean install of my development system. Even using imaging software (Acronis TrueImage), it took me 3 reinstalls and about 15 backup restores (each taking 30+ minutes) until I had a rock-solid clean install of everything.

For example, originally the first thing I did was to install NVidia’s NForce (mainboard chipset) drivers. Once you do that, you system will freeze for 40-60 seconds once in a while. The .NET Framework 3.5 on the Visual Studio 2008 Express DVD would not install without error. My sound card would cause BSODs when I combined the wrong mainboard drivers with my sound card drivers. I have to use inofficial sound card drivers because Creative Labs is hell-bent on providing support for their X-Fi line of sound cards only.

So if you want to do productive work, personally, I’ll sadly have to recommend Windows XP. If you want to have a trouble-free gaming experience and you can do without DirectX 10, Windows XP it is.

There’s a small problem in the Visual Studio IDE that isn’t really a blocker but can be really annoying: If you set your “Error List” or “Output” panels to auto-hide (that’s the mode in which they slide into the borders of the main window so you can only see their captions), sometimes, these windows will get stuck.

What typically happens in my case is that I double click on an error in the “Error List” panels, the source code editor opens the file in question, but the “Error List” panels stays open, with my cursor hidden behind the “Error List” window so I cannot see the code I’m supposed to fix. Even if I move the mouse to the other side of the screen and keep hammering the Escape key, the darn thing stays open

If I then just close the entire panel, the next time it pops up, it will have auto-hide disabled and waste precious space in your IDE window. As I said, nothing terrible, but it’s regularly nagging me.

Now I’ve found the solution: Use the keyboard shortcut that opens the panel and it will, after the usual time it’s supposed to stay open, slide away again. For the “Error List” window, that shortcut happens to be Ctrl+W,E and for the “Output” window, it’s Ctrl+Alt+O (at least if you chose the Visual C# Developer profile for your IDE).

As far as I know, this little bug has persisted from Visual Studio 2005 (maybe even earlier, I don’t remember) up to Visual Studio 2008 and seemingly affects all editions, including the Express SKUs.

This is how I am installing Windows Vista x64 with Visual C++ Express 2008 on an NForce 590 SLI board.

1. Open PC case, remove 2 GB of RAM. Otherwise Setup will bluescreen in the final stage because some ’storport.sys’ driver can’t cope with 4 GB of RAM.

2. Install Windows Vista

3. Download and apply KB929777. When KB929777 wants to reboot, do it - but turn off the PC at the BIOS screen.

4. Reinstall the removed 2 GB of RAM and close the case again

5. Let Windows Vista download all available updates. Take care not to install any drivers, especially not the NVidia nForce drivers and very especially not the MediaShield storage driver. Otherwise Windows will hang for 20-30 seconds every so often and the Event Log would show a bus reset event due to a timeout.

6. Start regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices\ and rename ‘D:’ to ‘H:’ - I don’t want my XP partition to be drive D: and windows doesn’t allow me to perform this simple change even though my Windows XP partition is clearly not a locked system partition while I’m running Windows Vista.

6. Install Daemon Tools, mount the Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions ISO, but don’t install Visual C++ 2008 Express first. Otherwise, it would install for 30 minutes and than crash setup.exe (”setup.exe has stopped working and needs to be closed. blablabla”), failing the install.

7. Browse to the .NET Framework 3.5 installer in the Visual C# 2008 Express folder on the VS2008 EE DVD and run it manually. The one in the Visual C++ 2008 Express folder is broken and the reason for the crash in step 6.

8. Reboot and install Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition. This time it will work.

9. Make an image of the Vista partition using Acronis True Image Home. Make sure you don’t have any dynamic disks in your setup because they would be silently deleted by the time you see the Acronis startup screen.

10a. If I’m feeling lucky, try installing sound card drivers for my Audigy 2. The built-in drivers only generate a very low volume and sound like crap. The official Creative Labs drivers sound like louder crap and come with the Creative Audio Console, which allows you to make sound even worse by selecting the ‘Headphones’ option. To obtain recent drivers, google for “No More Goat Soup” and download those drivers. They have been built from the X-Fi drivers in a frankensteinian way. They will completely fix the volume issue and sound great, but cause a bluescreen every other hour

10b. If I’m feeling masochistic, install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007. Upon the next reboot, any any kind of networking will be gone for good. No internet, no home network, nothing. Attempting to fix this once it occurred will freeze the system. This happens on all variants of the NForce4 and NForce5 chipset.

10c. For good fun, install the .NET Framework 3.5 from the VCExpress folder on the Visual Studio 2008 Express DVD. It is broken. Either install another Visual Studio Language first, or manually follow the steps in paragraph 7 using the VCSExpress folder.

Time taken to do a clean install of Windows Vista: 1 Week, 2 Days+.

I just bought myself the Logitech G9 Laser Gaming Mouse:

This mouse has all the features I could ever wish for:

• 3200 DPI (For gaming, I usually turn the DPI setting all the way up and reduce the mouse sensitivity in the game itself. This results in superior aiming because even the tiniest movements don’t get filtered out by the mouse but reach the game and are just scaled down.)
• Adjustable Weights
• Tiltable scroll wheel for horizontal scrolling
• Big teflon feet that cover the whole width of the mouse (my MX-518 has already lost 3 of its 5 tiny teflon cushions)
• Scroll wheel can be toggled between smooth or stepped scrolling

All in all, this mouse unites everything I ever wanted from a mouse.

But it utterly fails in the ergonomics department:

• The cord is rough and feels like it is made out of nylon. I don’t like it one bit. This gives me a really ugly feeling, especially when the cord runs over the edge of my table.
• The thumb pit is too small for my thumb
  • I can’t easily reposition the mouse because I don’t get a good grip on it.
  • My thumb is permanently pressed against the edges of the forward/backward buttons, up to the point that it hurts.
  • The alternate cover allows me to grip the mouse, but it’s rough and its thumb pit has the same problem.

This could truly have been the holy grail of mice. Everything about the functionality of the G9 is totally over the top. And that just makes it all the more painful to admit that its ergonomics utterly destroy the G9.

I’ve tried several mice over the last two years, but each time, I quickly returned to my good old Logitech MX-518. Among the candidates were a Razer Diamondback and the Microsoft Habu. Now the Logitech G9 has to line up in this list of expensive mistakes. *sob*