Best Operating System Opinions

[HeyYou]

The 8.1 update isn't going to fix anything. The "Start" button is going to do exactly what the windows key on the keyboard already does. Might just as well simply move you mouse a few pixels to the left, click, and there ya go. It's flat out stupid.

 

There ARE, however, projects on sourceforge that put a REAL start button back in the taskbar, and also those that boot directly to the desktop. Of course, 8 is still a pretty immature operating system... and I don't care to be an unpaid beta tester for MS.

 

I still run XP on my gaming machine. (64 bit version) Trouble is, finding drivers for some peripherals is pretty much impossible. (try finding a printer driver for XP64......) Not to mention that support from MS goes away next year.

 

Something else to keep in mind, With the advent of Windows Vista, directsound (a component of directx, something most games use to interact with the hardware on your windows based machine) went away. The end result here is that ALL sound processing (useing direct sound calls) is now FORCED to go thru the processor. Rendering that nice, expensive, hardware accelerated sound card to something little better than AC97 onboard audio. Sure, there is a 'workaround' for that, Creative Alchemy for SoundBlaster cards, and another one for Asus based sound cards, that I just can't remember the name at the moment.... But, those are exactly that. Workarounds. Basically its an app running in the background that intercepts directsound calls, and converts them to OpenAL. It works, but, there is a bit of a performance hit. How much of one? Depends on the rest of your machine. Probably, a decent gaming rig wouldn't really notice it. Probably.....

 

Even so, at this point, some version of Windows 7 64 bit is going to be your best bet for an O/S for a gaming machine.