My Vista/Delphi/Dev experience

It was reported to me that my visualizer does not
run on Vista. So after 3 weeks of indoctrinating
myself to fix the issue I finally bit the bullet

My configuration:

P4 with HT 3.2 GHZ
2G - RAM
CMI9880 Onboard audio card
nVidia 8800 GTX
2 monitors - 2560x1600 Dell WFP30 and 1280x1024 BenQ

1. Went to tigerdirect and bought external HD
with SATA connection and disconnected my
main system drive, just to be on safe side;)
2. Popped Vista Ultimate DVD in and let it go.
(Clean install)
3. It started ok and then went 30 min of doing
nothing. Just before I lost my patience it showed
graphics installation dialog. Asked me registration
key, regional settings etc. etc.
4. Running further it hung on last stage for 1 hr.
5. Tried it few times disabling all hardware I can
in the BIOS with the same results. Discovered
that I am not alone.
6. After screwing around for few hours suddenly
guessed that can disconnect one monitor.
Guess what, whole install flew and completed in
30 minutes approximately.
7. Downloaded nVidia display drivers and connected
second monitor. Works like a charm
8. Installed Delphi and all libs I needed to compile
visualizer. No troubles there, just some UAC
prompts.
9. Started it under debugging. No errors no nothing
but screen is blanc. After further investigation
discovered that all texture coordinates passed
to my pixel shaders are 0. Nice one. Made another
guess, added Vertex shaders that were just passing
data through and voila, it worked. Well it IS LEGAL
not to write Vertex shaders and only use pixel
For some reason uncle Bill decided that my life is
probably too dull and decided to change the behavior
without letting me know
Now to sound part.
10. Took a while to get drivers for my onboard card
working. Ok I got the sound but Vista disabled
so called "What U Hear" recording line, so my
visualizer can not grab sound from the card.
Nice eh? I guess someone is really into DRM stuff.
Just for fun downloaded few other visualizers
and they all refused to capture sound. Mind you
on Win2003 server mine and theirs worked flawlessly.
Got Soundblaster and that one let me capture sound.
Ok, half crippled but it workes
11. Performane: crap, crap, crap. I got the best card
one can get at the moment and Vista managed to turn it
to snail. It severely limited FPS of my proggy
whenever I open window to full screen (meanwhile
all render targets and backbuffer are constant
size). IDIOTS. On XP and Win2003 server it just flies
13. Then just tried to play with Vista. First Aero glass.
In first few minutes it looked nice but then it
started driving me nuts. Too much visual gizmos
and slowdowns. Just a great distractor.
Went to classic mode. Ok that one looks clean
but lots of things changed for no reasons.
They do not make things any more intuitive
and some things I knew about went somewhere else.
14. Boot time is very good but many apps for
some reason behave sluggishly whether in
aero or classic mode.

So IMHO it is a total waste of effort and money.
In five years and got knows how many million dollars
they just added some vsual thingis at the expence of
raping hardware.

So ok. I made my soft work but other then that I will
be the last one on Earth installing Vista. IMHO large
software vendors lately serving nobody but themselves.
Sounds familiar eh?
.

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