Vista EMachine & Sims 2: Should I wait?

[BionixWV33]

Ok, have been playing Sims 2 on my two XP machines for awhile, with one offering better gameplay as it has an AMD Athlon 64 3200+.Now, my latest desktop, an EMachine T3612 with Vista Home Premium, with a Celeron D 3.46 GHz, and onboard shared memory graphics courtesy of an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950,Up to 224MB Shared Video Memory.Now, should I wait till I get a PCIE16 video card before I go trying to install and play Sims 2, as yes, my 2 XP machines both have Radeon 9200 AGP cards in them, with 128 MB, and my EMachine only takes PCI Express 16 cards, or would the onboard graphics suffice for now?Remember, the Vista video requirements are "heavier" than Sims 2, so that kinda clues me in that it would suffice for now. Anyone have any suggestions..........beos.........kathy........?

[BeosBoxBoy]

my advice - and you may yake it or leave it - is buy the system - but also buy a copy of Windows XP and immediately upon opening the case format the hard drive and install Windows XP -- The Intel 950 should play the game (not sure how well, but well enough I guess, until you can afford a PCI-E video card.  Since you have two other PCs available, if you decided to go with the Emachine, just use the XP systems to download drivers and such for the XP platform.

Vista + The Sims 2 is a road of woe and hardship

[abaris]

Actually I have both systems installed on seperate drives. Vista isn't as demanding as everybody claims. Actually I have the Sims installed under Vista and the performance seems to be better than under XP.

[Willow7697]

ive been trying to get sims2 to run on my new vista for two weeks.  and it wont work.  im thoroughly frustrated.  i guess at this point im going to have to reload xp and use that.  this totally sucks.

[abaris]

ive been trying to get sims2 to run on my new vista for two weeks.  and it wont work.  im thoroughly frustrated.  i guess at this point im going to have to reload xp and use that.  this totally sucks.

Why didn't it work? What's the error? Might be, that you don't install with administrator rights. Anyway, it worked fine with me, so give some more informations and we can probably work it out.

[BeosBoxBoy]

abaris, perhaps you might want to reference the official list of bugs on the Vista system contained in your game's readme file.  That is just what EA is willing to admit -- the BBS is full of threads on this topic, as well as computer help forums all over the internet -- not only TS2 but about every game on the market.  Just because you don't have a problem doesn't invalidate the 10s of 1000s of people who do - and only about 20% of the bugs arise from not installing as an admin - 100s of other possible reasons run the gamut from driver conflicts to improper 32-bit mode implimentation to DX10 incompatability isses with video or audio hardware

[abaris]

beosboxboy, that's exactly the reasons why I still have XP on the other drive. But if Willow7697 owns a premade system with Vista installed, one can at least try to work out the error, if he was giving some more information. And reformating to instal an older system is probably more of a pain than getting one single application running.

[BeosBoxBoy]

Abaris, I do not disagree with you in "theory", but if you read on, you see why I strongly believe a re-format/re-install is preferable for most currently available Vista systems.

Probably seven out of ten systems you find offered with Vista pre-installed have hardware that is not rated for DirectX 10, that figure will decrease as sub-contractors that manufacture pre-built systems in Taipei deplete their warehouses full of old useless crap parts that barely supported DX9.  The same was true when Windows XP systems appeared on the market, and before that Windows ME.

The low end of the pre-fab market is always a nightmare; this is one of the several reasons Microsoft makes it a part of their OEM contract that the makers of pre-fab systems support the OS on their pre-fab systems.  There was one motherboard in particular that was original manufactured for use in HP systems with XP that was such a legendary menace that HP pulled the mobos from systems before they even hit market and broke the contract with the 3rd party manufacturer.  The 3rd party manufacturer then set up a dummy corporation that ran the bad mobos out to those computer shows that are little more than a giant mobile flea market/carny operation.  The exact model escapes my memory at the moment, but anyone who ever had this make of mobo will immediately know the one I am talking about since the HP load-logo was still present in the BIOS. In any event, a simple search on Google.com for either "worst motherboard" or "worst computer" will readily bear results that demonstrate that there are plenty of contenders for either category.

Pre-fab systems are by and large an assemblage of cast off and left-over parts of the cheapest, worst sort regardless of which "discount" OEM company you are dealing with. Emachines, HP, Compaq, Dell, etc., all have their bottom of the market items.  I would say that if you can pick it up on the cheap, there is usually a damned good reason it is so cheap.  Look at the vast number of laptops that have the ATI x300 mobility GPU, a GPU that is probably one of the most ill-designed and faulty 3D chip-sets ever made, yet was advertised by both ATI and OEM companies as "game-ready" and as the many posts in this and other fora will readily attest, it just ain't so.

There are literally 1000s of POS systems out there, and somewhere among them is the newest iteration of the "worst computer ever made", and right now through the magic of the Internet, someone (x 2000) is buying it.

In 16 years of dealing with PCs, I have found this one fact to be invariable: the first two years any new version of Windows is available, the systems you can find pre-installed with that new version will in all instances be better served by the predecessor version.  Windows ME would be the extreme example here, and what is Windows XP Media Centre Edition but Windows ME with a Windows XP face-lift?  

All of this would be easily avoided if every computer user was highly informed, technologically sophisticated, and financially able to custom built their own system with only the best hardware; this, however, has not been the case anytime in my life.  So the general philosophy of this tech-head, is find a solution that does work to resolve the issues in the least painful manner for the less tech-headed... a "practise" that often is contrary in all ways to the "theory" I was taught.

I have found this one fact to be true of 90% of computer users: they just want it to work, they don't give a rat's arse for knowing or understanding why or how to get it to work; this was a powerfully hard-earned thing I came to realise.  Once realising this to be the truth, my stress levels as an IT tech became negligible... and oddly enough a corresponding drop in stress occurred with my clients :lol:

[abaris]

That's probably right and the major reason why I build my systems instead of buying a complete one. Maybe that's also the reason why Vista runs without any major problems on my system, since I configured it with DX10 and all the other things known about Vista in mind.

But you had the same issues with XP when you were buying a rig instead of building it. If you didn't go for high end, you were stuck with cheap parts, that didn't even work together well.