Well Future Mark the premiere benchmarking for gaming systems has released yet another of their benchmark applications. The trends in these benchmarking tools has been pretty solid getting progressively more appealing as the hardware is able to handle more information and graphics. The process of installing and running the application is getting more tedious as the versions get pumped out. The latest in the franchise is a Vista DirectX 10 benchmark utility. I was excited to try this one out and could not wait to see what advancements they had made in the visuals using DirectX 10.

Download and Install
The download was extremely quick using the free download path and ran upwards of 500kbs. It took a few minutes to download the 450MB file. When running the application it installed with no problems to the x86 directory on my 64bit Vista install. When I tried to run the application it loaded the window and then displayed a page not found error. When running benchmarks I disable all firewall and anti virus to maximize free cpu and ram. After a couple more attempts to run it the page finally displayed. Much to my dismay it was a page with ordering options and no prices. The free trial is now only a one time use, the multi use if $6.95 and the rest I didn’t bother looking at. So I register the onetime use for free, open the email and copy the registration code into the text field. INVALID REGISTRATION CODE. WTF this is the code they just sent. I try it again with the same copy paste and it works. So far not a very stable application and quite annoying to get running.

System Specs
Intel Quadcore QX6700 Extreme 2.66ghz
8GB Corsair XMS2 DDR2 Ram
Geforce 8800GTX 768MB DDR3
Gigabyte DQ6 Mainboard.
WD 74GB 10K rpm Raptor OS Drive
Windows Vista x64 Business

The Tests
After what seems an eternity the tests load up. I sit back to watch DirectX 10 at it’s finest. The first test was a pretty lame scene in a watery room with some characters running around. The models and textures are reminiscent of Lara Croft a few generations back from the current game. Poor weighting on the models and low quality textures. The water is non reflective and terrible. The bloom and anti aliasing was horrible and looked like it was way over done to hide the poor workmanship on the scene. An average frame rate of 12fps was had, On my system I was not impressed at all, I mean seriously I play Crysis on this system at a higher frame rate.

The second test was a space scene that had the same over bloomed effect. The scene felt like it was a look how many asteroids with poor textures we can fit in one scene. A cheap camera fly through in the scene and a couple of ships flying by. The planet in the background was neat however it seemed as though there was a poor texture seam on the mapping. Frame rates on this test were bouncing from 8FPS to 22FPS. Still not very impressed with the benchmark so far.

Test 3 is some airplanes doing a pylon race. OMG the graphics are horrible there seems no point in even having this test in there. It is testing the CPU capabilities using a crappy background and some lowpoly planes buzzing around dough nuts. Totally unimpressed. The final test was a similar scene to test PhysX using CPU and software rendering. Pointless looking test and brought the system to a crawl.

Results
Well now that I won’t get those precious minutes of my life back and being permanently scared emotionally by the garbage graphics I just sat through. I anxiously await my score. Click here to view your score online, Oh yeah I forgot that FutureMark stopped showing your score unless you go on the site and compare against other testers. I click the link and nothing happens, the application hangs and then displays an error pop-up. I click the link a second time and finally the page opens after what seems like an eternity. The results where disheartening to say the least. My machine was a middle of the road setup, and to add salt to the wound the software did not even recognize my CPU as the EXTREME edition.

Conclusion
Two thumbs down on this waste of bandwidth. Actually I think this garbage has ruined FutureMark for me all together. I will never again use this benchmarking utility again. This is a prime example of what happens to so many great tools and applications. The more popular it gets the worse it gets as versions are released. Maybe it is bureaucracy or greed getting in the way. Whatever it is shame on you for letting a great benchmark tool degrade into such crap.

My Results

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Well as I began using the Windows Vista SP1 update and putting it through its paces on my laptop. Some major concerns have come up which have now caused me to uninstall the service pack and wait till Microsoft gets it right before I install it again.

Problems:

I predominantly use Firefox as my browser but after installing SP1 Firefox began hanging when loading pages, especially during tabbed browsing sessions. I tried to recreate this problem in IE7 but I could not recreate the problem. The router and modem are working fine and tested well on other computers in the network. After uninstalling add-ons and trying an upgrade to Beta 5 of firefox I still found the same problems occurring. Therefore I concluded that this is a conflict between Firefox and SP1, where does the blame lie? I would put the blame on Microsoft myself considering that Firefox was working fine before the update.

When shutting down the laptop the system would hang at “Shutting Down” at one point I left the system to see how long it would hang but after 45mins I decided it was time to hit the power button. After fixing some registry entries the main one being this:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control] On the right panel look for the “WaitToKillServiceTimeout” string and change it value to 5000 by right clicking the string and selecting Modify…

Default Value WaitToKillServiceTimeout=20000

Modified value WaitToKillServiceTimeout=5000

This sped up the shutdown time a little but it would still hang on some shutdowns. With these to issues I have had enough of SP1, a service pack is supposed to enhance the usability of a system not cripple regularly used programs. At this time I am going to wait until the update is available through windows update. [NOTE] On my x64 VIsta system in the office I have not seen these problems, all though on that machine the update came through windows update. The x64 system is also a desktop and built with newer components.

Thats it for now, I patiently await a REAL service pack from Microsoft for Vista.

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Well its here and ready to install, Windows Vista SP1. I grabbed the install from the downloads because its not available for Windows Update until April18, 2008.

The Review
This install took approximately a 1/2 Hr. and was uneventful, this installation was on my Fujitsu 6025 Lifebook. Reboot worked without out fail and there it was. Some of the first things that I noticed was that the delay in file transfer estimation was gone as I transferred some large files from one partition to another. The file transfer rate on the 5400RPM laptop drive was approx. 5-6MB/Sec but the update bar is more consistent than it is in the non SP1 setup.

When using FireFox and trying to open html links from within applications like Mail there is an error that pops up saying that the page cannot be found but then FireFox loads the page anyway. It is more of a minor inconvenience than a major problem. There is a driver compatibility problem with SP1 and the Fujitsu shock sensor. A quick check on the Fujitsu site netted me an updated driver that seems to be working properly.

I am still finding that the network detection tools are still weak, often when clicking network my router is not in the list so to log-in to the router I have to go in via http. Other times the router appears and the standard Right Click>View Device Web-page is available. Network access is quicker when navigating through shared folder on the XP machine in the network.

Display adapters
There was supposed to be fixes in this Service Pack for display adapters running multiple displays from a notebook. I have not yet seen the fix I was looking for, when I plug my plasma T.V. into the laptop via VGA I can use it as a second monitor but when I unplug it from the laptop the task/start menu bar goes invisible with a thin outline of where it is supposed to be. In order to get it back I have to stop the dwm.exe (Desktop Window Manager) from the task manager and let it restart the service for the start menu to appear again. Still no fix for this error in the new SP1.

So far I have seen one of the fixes that I was looking for in HDD file transfer and Network access but other than that there is not much of a change to the general functionality of Vista.

Well that is my first glance, I will make updates to the post as I delve into the update a little more.

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Well I have been running Windows Vista 64 bit for a week now and all the bad things that I heard from people when I decided to switch have not happened. The system runs very efficiently all of my software works well with it and even games are running smoother and with less video glitches.

Problems that I have found to date are as follows.

1. SyncToy from Microsoft does not work on x64 bit vista but there is a work around that I found here.
2. PCI Simple communications Device driver not found but after uninstalling the device and running diagnostics when it was found on reboot. I was directed to a link to an Intel download that corrected the problem.

Windows is recognizing all of the RAM installed in the system currently 4GB with the other 4GB en route. Overall I am very happy with how well vista 64 is running and there is no conflict with any of my applications. Install time was just shy of 15min from boot to reboot after install. Adobe Master Collection CS3 installed in a very short time compared to installing it on the XP system.

64 bit OS’s are the future and if you are building a new system then I highly recommend Vista 64. If you are worried about certain applications not running in 64 bit environment then you can just run them in compatibility mode. 16bit applications won’t run on 64bit but seriously there is not a reason to run 16bit applications in todays world.

Here is a great site for tweaking Vista and learning more about how to speed up the OS at pcstats.com.

Well thats it for now folks. If you have any questions or want me to test things feel free to drop a comment.

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