The Gamers’ Temple Oracle

I’ve been holding out as long as possible, but I’ve finally had to bite the bullet and upgrade one of our gaming PCs to Windows Vista. Vista just hasn’t struck me as a necessary upgrade. The next time we need to get a new PC we’ll certainly order it with Vista installed, but Windows XP Pro has been doing its job well enough around here and the thought of breaking numerous vital apps (i.e. games) by making the move filled me with dread. That all changed with the arrival at our offices of an innocuous little package with a certain game called Halo 2 for Vista inside. Now I actually had a reason to go for the upgrade and I picked one of our Dell XPS PCs to be our sacrificial guinea pig (I had nothing against this computer, it’s primary qualifications being that it was not the PC I use for my day to day work and it wasn’t the one I used to play World of Warcraft).

The first step in the upgrade process was to download Microsoft’s Vista Upgrade Advisor application to the PC and verify that it would play nice with Vista. Other than a few warnings regarding incompatible apps (the antivirus program, CD burning software, etc., no surprises there), the application seemed to be happy with the PC and so I went forward with the upgrade. I chose the Ultimate version because I wanted the benefits of the Business edition without losing the multimedia features. I prepped the PC by removing the anti-virus, firewall, and other incompatible utility software and then running the disk defragger on the hard disk. After that I was ready to take the plunge and popped in the upgrade disk.

There were a couple of minor prompts to click-through at the beginning, but after that the whole process was automated. This is not a quick process by any stretch of the imagination, though. The install program warned me that it could take “several hours” to complete and it wasn’t kidding. I can’t say exactly how long it took because I didn’t stand over it through the whole process, but it did clock in at over four hours. Once it got through all that there were the standard timezone and clock type of settings to enter, and a short reboot later I was in Windows Vista. This was not the end of the process, though, as the first thing it did was go onto the internet and determine that there were ten or so updates that I needed to download. After the downloads and another reboot I was back into the Vista desktop. However, I was still not ready for Halo 2 as I had to take care of the lack of anti-virus protection in Vista. It comes with a firewall but when it comes to anti-virus protection all you get is an informational warning informing you that you have none. After locating a Vista-compatible anti-virus package, downloading it, and installing it I was ready for the next step, which still was not running Halo 2. The Vista installation did a great job of detecting the machine’s hardware, but it did a woefully inadequate job of providing the latest drivers for some of the hardware such as the graphics card, even after it went on the internet to look for updates. I had to at least go to the vendor sites for the video and sound cards and get the latest drivers before diving into Halo 2. More installation programs, more reboots. Lastly it was time to add the Xbox 360 Wireless Gaming Receiver for Windows so that I could use an Xbox 360 controller with the game. Guess what? The installation disk that came with the receiver didn’t include a Vista driver, so it was back to the internet and another download and install. Finally, five plus hours later I was ready to play Halo 2.

It took a lot of time and expense to get a PC running Windows Vista and ready to play a game, and I was lucky enough not to run into any issues bigger than some outdated drivers. I haven’t had a chance to try out some of the other games on that PC under Vista, but I did try World of Warcraft and found that the patcher had issues at the very end of its process which left the game in an infinite state of trying to patch itself each time I tried to load up the game. I’ll have to defer my overall opinion of whether or not the upgrade is worth the trouble until after I’ve had some time to put Vista through its paces and try out some of its new features. I can say that the interface is pretty slick, but a spiffy interface alone is not worth a couple of hundred dollars.

Oh, and what about Halo 2? Well you’ll have to read my review of the game after I’ve had the chance to play my way through the game…

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 8:27 am and is filed under PC Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.