Heya everyone,

Just wanted to share some experiences i've had installing Vista Business (32-bit for now, the 64-bit media is in the mail – upgrading from XP Pro), in case someone else is curious.

Hardware wise, i'm running:

Athlon 64 X2 5000+
4 Gigs of RAM
ASUS M2N-Deluxe motherboard
Nvidia GeForce 7950 GTX

Feeling quite nervous I popped the DVD into the drive, and pushed the big shiny button. I selected the “upgrade” option rather then a clean install.

After about an hour and a half (!) of copying/extracting/configuring – and generous helping of rebooting, the system came up with all my software completely intact (First surprise). All the user account we're valid (Second surprise), and everything seemed to work – and by that I mean, network, tablet, video card, audio (Third suprprise).

I've been kicking around houdini for a few hours now, and superficially, I haven't encountered a single issue yet – and I don't know if it's the excitement of the ‘new’, but it seems somehow, snappier

I plan to install the 64-bit version when I receive it, and I will post what I expect will be less successful test results when I have them.

At any rate, I am *not* coming to sad realization. yet.

Cheers,

Gene

ps: Googling “vista upgrade” reveals many a horror story. Please take that into account, should you choose to experiment in such an irresponsible manner. :wink:

Supposedly if you use one of the new “Hybrid” hard drives Vista will get much faster (also called “ReadyDrives”).

In addition, the smart caching it allows will allow for less disk access so it will also increase battery life for laptops.

That's great to hear it works. I just ordered a laptop but opted for XP Pro. I do have a free Vista upgrade certificate I have to fill out… but I plan to wait until at least Vista SP1.

The new DX10 upgrades (that you have to have Vista for) are going to be amazing in the future for gaming and other packages that use DirectX for hardware rendering. Unfortunately Houdini only uses OpenGL which tends to lag behind DirectX and Houdini doesn't even keep up with current OpenGL hardware shader capability, meaning it is far behind Maya/XSI/Max in this regard.

-Craig

I've been kicking around houdini for a few hours now, and superficially, I haven't encountered a single issue yet – and I don't know if it's the excitement of the ‘new’, but it seems somehow, snappier

There might be… MS rewrote the driver model entirely, so perhaps the removal of all that legacy code sped things up a bit. Might give the video drivers a bit of a boost.

Of course, the downside is by rewriting the driver model, a lot of older devices may not work if the manufacturer decides not to support the new driver model. I believe printers & webcams were the biggest offenders there, from what I've read on the web.

Heya everyone,

Just a minor update for now. I managed to install Vista-64 yesterday afternoon, after about 2.5 hours on the phone with microsoft support (I kept getting a BSOD during the installation – the remedy was to remove 3 of the 4 Gigs of RAM I had installed, install the OS, then put the RAM back in :shock: who releases software like this? honestly! I pity IT departments worldwide – but not really :wink: ).

Confidence reducing (not to mention frustrating) installation pains aside, Houdini seems fairly well behaved.

It's early goings, so I can't make a decent judgment call, but superficially everything seems functional, including home-brew productions tools written using the .NET 3.0 framework (which, I thought would be toast, for sure…)

Will write more once I've put a job or two through it…

Cheers,

Gene

ps: On a somewhat related note, Quicktime hates Vista, or perhaps, Vista hates Quicktime – but at any rate they don't seem to play well together at this time.

My initial Windows Triumvirate (Photoshop, Quicktime, Tablet drivers that map Intuos 3 buttons correctly) has been reduced to a Biumvirate! (is that even a word?) -for the time being anyway. It's almost like being back in Linux land… :roll:

One more thing… while i'm ranting :evil:

Since placing the support call to Microsoft, i've received 4(!!!) survey calls asking all manner of questions about the quality of support i've received from Microsoft.

None of them seemed even remotely interested in resolving the actual issue which put me on the phone in the first place.

No great surprise really… but still, kinda frustrating. And by kinda, I mean very…

Cheers,

Gene

Bit of an update – in case someone else is curious.

It seems that I've hit a bit of snag.

Seemingly, I'm unable to get hardware accelerated openGL. Tumbling the viewport sends my CPU to 100%.

I'm pointing the finger at the beta drivers (forceware 158.18), as Vista-32 didn't seem to have the same issue.

Will post more info as I get it.

Cheers,

Gene

Heya everyone,

Just a minor update for now. I've discovered that most of my OGL issues seem to hover around the Cd Attribute (be in a point Cd, or a prim Cd). Blowing those attributes away makes houdini go zoom again.

On an unrelated note, i've recently discovered the microsoft powershell: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx [microsoft.com]

It's clearly not a substitute for a proper shell, but also a far cry from the command prompt. It's free, and it doesn't suck, so check it out. It features highlights like, ls, ps, cat, and many other unix favourites.

Cheers,

G

ps: still no grep, but there's a sort, so at least we are moving in the right direction

keyframe
Heya everyone,

ps: On a somewhat related note, Quicktime hates Vista, or perhaps, Vista hates Quicktime – but at any rate they don't seem to play well together at this time.

My initial Windows Triumvirate (Photoshop, Quicktime, Tablet drivers that map Intuos 3 buttons correctly) has been reduced to a Biumvirate! (is that even a word?) -for the time being anyway. It's almost like being back in Linux land… :roll:

I don't know if this has been fixed now, but i just bought a new laptop which came with vista installed and I had no problems putting quicktime on it. I haven't tried making a movie with pro yet but it seems to run ok.

I am seeing the opengl performance of Houdini dropping somewhat but I haven't tried playing with the drivers yet. Nothing to do with Cd attributes - just the redraw of the interface, in fact the viewport seems fine its updating parameters and nodes that is sluggish.

I see in this thread

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=7726&highlight=vista [sidefx.com]

that its to be expected in H8 and below, which sounds like a hint that H9 maybe alright… may have to check that with sesi before I run back to XP or Linux.

Other than that I kinda like the Vista experience so far, I don't think I'd want it on a work machine but for home its rather nice and slick. Although it does require a huge amount of RAM to achieve…. The up side is that even cheap laptops seem to be getting 2Gb RAM by default now just because the operating system uses so much. If I do rip out vista and put on Linux I'll have tons of memory to play with…

hi simon, are you using vista x64? if quicktime works with vista x64, that sounds good.

No just 32 bit - no real need for x64 on a laptop…