Confirmed.

It seems they found the bug and corrected it. The bug is gone with SP2 RC1 for Vista. Played for more than an hour, now, without a crash or lockup.

Have you tested Windows 7 beta yourself? Yes it is based on the vista kernel but it is much better. I've been testing it for months now and it is superior to Vista, and I like Vista so it's no bash against it but win7 really is much better.


P.S. I've been wondering about all these people getting the NVK errors and why I never saw it, then it came out that SP2 solved it and I said "Ohhh, well I've been running SP2 beta for months, no wonder I never saw the error", lol.

Yes and yes. Win7 basic installation is better (for playing) than Vista Ultimate standard installation.

However, my configured Vista runs better than the Win7 beta with almost any game and program I used, so I doubt the difference is so big. It looks differently (it has to, to be obviously different from Vista) and it has a different approach to install things needed instead of things available. But most things are exactly the same and I see no improvement in loading times and FPS in any game I tested so far.

Just to make it clear: Win7 is the better OS. It is, because it is easier to use, not because it is new.
Check out this site for some tests of the stunning similarities of Win7 and Vista behind the new looks:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/...ndows-7_1.html


To your PS:
The error depends very much on the hardware-combination. Some boards and memory-combinations are less vulnerable to this addressing problem, Overclocking, Power-Supply and even the amount of memory (RAM & VRAM) influences the error enormously. That is, what makes it so difficult to handle and why there are so many ways to solve it.

What has worked for a number of people, at least using Vista 32bit, is to open MSCONFIG, then open the BOOT TAB and click the ADVANCED button.
In this there are two check boxes at the top... one for BOOT PROCESSOR NUMBER, this is for the number of cores. Tick the box and select the number of cores which are present in the system.
The other checkbox is for the amount of RAM present in the system. Tick this box also and dial in the total amount of RAM present (this is for 4GB users as well), or the maximum the selector window will allow.

REBOOT and run

DETECT HAL checkbox should be ticked automatically after reboot.

I'll stick with "Windows 98" thank you... ;)

Your not alone out there jumping past Me 2 ;) XP32-SP3 is the best gaming platform out there now... SP1 sure made Vista better, but it's still not good enough. They had a lot of good thoughts locking things down and restricting direct access to hardware etc - too bad they did not get it to work. The Windows 7 beta is what they really wanted Vista to be. Let's hope they get all the pieces together for the release...

I've been running a dual boot with XP32 and Vista 64 Ultimate since the beta days. I think that I've been booting in XP 97% of the time...

Excellent example!

Comparing a complete business-version against the basic stripped for download-beta....

Why did you buy Ultimate? Do you need shadow-copy for protection against data loss? Do you need Fax-Services? Do you need network rules for shared work on documents? Do you need automated maintenance routines? Do you need Aero? What for? Did you at least disable these things for your benchmarking?

Just a hint when buying Win7: Don't get the Ultimate-Version again. Ultimate does not mean ultimate solution for gaming. It means complete package for business operations, which is quite the opposite.

I will let you guess once why I use Ultimate ;)

EDIT: And I don't quite follow you... I compare Vista 64 Ultimate SP1 to Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate. Stripped down? My Windows folder is 12 Gb on an almost clean install...

Just to play the devils advocate here...I think its funny how so many people are hinging their hopes on "Windows 7".

Upon its release "Windows 7" may very well have as many problems as Vista did (has) when it was first released. And (years ago) I remember getting in a heated discussion with some "kid" (on another forum) where he was vehemently defending Vista as the "Ultimate platform of the future". He accused me of being an "old person" who was afraid of the future and he claimed that I couldn't see the superiority of "Vista" because I was "holding on to an aging & flawed platform"... I remember pointing out the that many times (in the past) micro$oft had failed to deliver on what they had promised, and that even with a beta floating around the internet consumers still can't be sure what the final product could be...

That's a role I love too ;) There are so many companies out there that have decided that Vista is not the right choice for their DTS platform - and hope that Windows 7 will be the savior. You have to believe in something ;) The problem for Microsoft is that the troublesome rollout of the Vista platform has been one of the factors that have revitalized the thin client alternative (hand in hand with the virtualization wave) - and as it is now Citrix, vmWare and Sun can rub their hands on the potential death of the thick client on large corporations... The big losers are naturally the hardware mongers but still, when running in an environment like that you will reduce the number of OS licenses needed. Thats part of the game...

Regarding the hope for Windows 7 vs Vista the big thing is that W7 is really NT6.1 - but for marketing reasons it will be called 7.0 to not get tainted by it's older brother (but it's not the father)... By this I mean that they are not starting from scratch as they did in a lot of areas for Vista. Windows seven is rather Vista SP2 (which is soon coming - I know). I'm also an old man beeing bashed by "kids" that I do not understand the potential of Vista, have not tweaked it right etc ;)