The part in there saying that they're invalidating the key was in all of the other versions of Windows.  It's not confirmed either other than in that one story.

They're still doing shady stuff though like adding a DRM service that checks the license of a video 30 times a second, killing analog holes, and locking the kernel for no reason other than to attempt to make a monopoly.  There's still no reason to upgrade to it though because there's no DX10 games and if you do upgrade you'll gimp OpenGL.

*grumble*stupid solaris 4th disk corrupted grr...*grumble*
Anyway, there's a lot of bullshit out there about Vista such as Pescado's comments about Vista invalidating your XP CD key.  Additionally, some People say is that a lot of stuff doesn't run on Vista but the reality is that about as much stuff is incompatible now as it was when people upgraded from 98 to XP.

TS2 isn't one of them, but there will be a negligible performance decrease like 5% since you're running it on Vista.  Still, you probably will just notice a speed increase just because your new computer is probably faster.  Games and applications that use OpenGL have about 50% of their previous performance due to the fact the drivers aren't built into the kernel anymore.

There's no reason at all that they can't port DX10 over to XP.  If they did that though there would be no point in buying it.  As for WMP 11, I hate the fact that I couldn't listen to my DAP when it was charging while I could with WMP 10.  That's another thing keeping me from upgrading to Vista in addition to the DRM and lower performance.

I use musikCube when I'm just listening to music(WMP 10 for syncing), and VLC for videos.  VLC will play pretty much anything you throw at it compared to Media Player Classic which requires codecs.

Hmm...

Vista's New Features
IE 7 - Can download onto XP.
WMP 11 - Can download onto XP.  10's better anyway.
Sidebar - Google Desktop, DesktopSidebar, and there's even a ported version to XP.
Desktop Search - Google Desktop, Yahoo Desktop Search.
Aero - There's no equivalent on Windows XP.
Flip3D - There's no equivalent on Windows XP.
UAC - You'll usually just click "Agree" anyway, I don't think it asks for a password to do anything so it's not as secure as Linux.
Windows Defender - Can download onto XP, worthless when you have a Virus Scanner.
DirectX 10 - Not in XP, but no games use it yet.  In addition, OpenGL has poor performance in Vista.

They cut out WinFS, PC-to-PC Sync(Groove?), and Monad which would have been reasons to actually buy the thing.  Instead they just added the things above, changed the Security Stack, and modified a lot of the interface to make it more Macish.

Still, since you have a coupon for Vista you might as well order it so if it does become worth having then you won't have to pay $150(Home Premium)/$250(Ultimate) for it.

Windows already does this with a quite few programs like Firefox, you can check which ones it does by going to the C:/Windows/Prefetch directory.  Prefetching will only help load your programs about a second quicker, it won't improve performance otherwise.  Same goes for Vista's SuperFetching.

I haven't seen any problems with my Geforce 6100 but I haven't looked and seen if there were fish in the aquarium.  My Integrated Geforce 4MX chipset had no issues but I stopped using it when Nightlife came out.  I also never have problems with new drivers so I could just be lucky.

I think the whole nVidia and ATI thing has to do with the fact that nVidia is better at OpenGL than ATI (which is why Doom3 runs so well on nVidia cards).  The Sims 2 supposedly runs off Direct3D which both cards are pretty much equal on.  This may have changed since I heard this though.

The fact TS2 uses Direct3D makes it impossible to run with Wine, and I doubt it's changed since I last checked.

Yeah, it loads all the skins in the Downloads and SavedSims folders.

Load times have very little to do with the RAM, they have more to do with the Processor.  Speaking of which, how big is your downloads folder?  If it's 17GB like someone else had on here there's no doubt that your excessive load times are caused by it.

What's your price range?  A budget video card ($50 or so) will work just fine for TS2 and will show Cutscenes, Smooth Edges, Higher Resolutions, etc.  If you get a better card the max resolution will increase, shadows/lighting won't lag the game as much, less lag with increased draw distance, etc.

Definitely upgrade the RAM to at least 1GB though, that'll have a greater impact on performance than a better video card and it's cheap.  As for the processor, don't bother since upgrading will probably require a new motherboard.

The worst things about Vista when I tried the RC1 version not including the horrible lag is the additional software they include with it like "Windows Defender" and the new version of WMP that is forcing my MP3 player to autodock.  Even though the upgrade would only be $5 for me, if they hadn't fixed that problem with WMP 11 or allow you to rollback to 10 then I'm sticking with XP.

Why does Microsoft insist I need something like "Windows Defender" anyway?  Anti-virus software removes most of that crap.  I know you can turn it off but you can't remove it like the rest of MS's programs.

@miros - I didn't even know the MTS2 wiki was still around, I'll have to take a look at it later.

I'm terrible at commenting my code, even if I bother to do so at all.  My comments usually just state the obvious like "assigns X to Y" when the code is "x = y;".  I haven't programmed a whole lot though and only know some C.

I don't know about this "middleman" stuff, if you're a good programmer you should be able to explain your work to a common person.

Isn't the localization package the source?  Anyway, the problem with the localization package/source is the fact that you need to use a Microsoftian product to compile it and it doesn't run unless you mess with it.  There's no way to get the old interface back easily anyway, for some reason Windows Forms likes to make everything huge.

Well we could try to make a MATY wiki again but have it tend to revolve around Modding than Retardo Land stuff.  However, I know Pescado's against this due to the fact that there are wikis out there for Sims that don't even.  The Sims 2 Wiki at Wikka barely has anything on it, thanks to the fact that no one can make new articles.

I'm certain there's some partnership with MTS2 and SimPE about not disclosing DBPF package info.  It's sort of suspicious that there's no data about it out there (Supposedly there's a Mac viewer for it) and any data that was given on making a tool like SimPE was destroyed by MTS2.  Speaking of formats, how is Lua related to Sims?  Is it the sourcecode for the package format or something?

Hell, there's problems even compiling SimPE with Visual C#.  Open my foot.  I think it's hilarious that Quaxi's making such a big deal of the code switching to .NET 2.0 and saying it's the next big thing when .NET 3.0 is the actual next version.

Two programs that are commonly used to make ISOs are Alcohol 120% and CloneCD.  If you don't have those you can use Nero Burning ROM but I'm not sure an image made by that will bypass the copy protections.  All of these solutions cost money so you're better off getting a No-CD crack or an Mini-image from GameCopyWorld.

As for mounting?  Most people use DAEMON Tools in combination with a SafeDisk hider like CureROM or sd4hide.

Reinstall OFB and see if that allows the game to recognize it again.

If PPC was better than why did Apple switch?  To run Windoze?

Then again there must be something good about that architecture since all of the "next-gen" gaming systems have a PPC processor of some sort in them.

Wasn't it the PPC processors in the old Macs that caused them to be slow and not the RAM?

Anyway, you'll have no problems running TS2 on that thing, I've got an Intel Core Solo of the same speed with an integrated card and even though it's under spec (No T&L on the card) it runs the game great.

They wouldn't even need to hack the password if they are logged in as the administrator at any time, all they would need to do is make a "Prevent forgotten Password" disk using a floppy or flashdrive and get right in.

The problem with people using Norton is the fact that it's $20 after rebates (One time I saw it for free) and most PCs come with a preinstalled 60 day trial.  Then, some people don't update it and get viruses along with the Norton Virus.  Sort of unrelated to this, Symantec and McAfee complained to Microsoft about Vista being too secure and complained about not getting kernel access.  Yeah, these are the kinds of people that I want to get my AV/Firewall from.

As for scanning, I've never actually come across a virus using NOD32 except for when I did the eicar test.  I scan every so often just for kicks.

avast! is a damn good AV and I used it for the longest time.  I found AVG too annoying since it wants to ask me to update every day where avast! would just do it automatically.

NOD32 has more protection for about the same resources as avast! though so I use NOD32 instead.  Heck, NOD32 only uses 40% of my CPU during a thorough scan.  The problem with NOD32 is the fact that it's not free, but it's cheaper than Norton and BitDefender.

I just don't get Firefox's Auto update sometimes, it wouldn't upgrade a 2.0 RC3 version to 2.0 even though it's been out for a week for example.  It seems to catch the 2.0.0.1 bugfix update just fine if you have 2.0 installed though.  At least it's better than Opera's Auto update which sticks another icon in the "Add/Remove Programs" list whenever you update it.

I've been using Fx 2.0 since the RC1 release and I haven't had the thing crash on me yet.  I barely use Opera anymore because of Fx's new version.

People keep suggesting FlashGet but whenever I try to use the thing it says you need an external download manager while DownThemAll doesn't.  The capabilities are similar, but I don't get why people don't recommend DTA instead.  Ah well.

As for the slow download, I'm thinking it could be something with a lot of people downloading crap from MATY and PMBD at the same time.  It'll probably download faster later when there's less people bombarding those sites.

To get an image for Daemon, you're going to need something like Alcohol 120% or CloneCD to make them.  Nero will do it, but I'm not sure that it makes a 1:1 copy like the others.  Alternatively, you can download an image file with a BitTorrent Client and mount that with Daemon.

As for mounting an image with Daemon:
1)Boot up Daemon Tools(If it's not started already)
2)Choose "All Options On" under the emulation menu.  The tray icon should turn green.
3)Hide the SafeDisk Protection using sd4hide.
4)Virtual CD/DVD-ROM > Device 0 > Mount Image.  Find the image file.
5)The image is now mounted and acts like a normal DVD.

Alternatively instead of using sd4hide you can use CureROM, which has a wizard for mounting images.

DAEMON Tools
CloneCD
Alcohol 120% (CAUTION:Contains spyware toolbar)

I use µTorrent since it has a tiny memory footprint, fast startup, doesn't require an installer, and only takes up 250KB of space.  I've tried Azureus and BitComet and the past, Azureus wasn't terrible but it booted up slow, had a large memory footprint, and I couldn't find a way to have it boot up on startup.  BitComet seemed to be faster but it seemed to take a bigger memory footprint than Azureus and it doesn't seem to have a way to control piece priority like Azureus and µTorrent have.

It's too bad µTorrent is Windows only, but you can run it in Linux via Wine.

The three times I installed it (Beta 2, RC1, Final) it didn't install WGA, or at least that's what the remover for WGA said.

I've got to agree with you here though, there's quite a few sites that I visit that don't render right in Opera.  The Opera team can flaunt the fact they can get a smiley with the Acid2 test, but it seems that anything that passes that test has problems rendering things as well as Firefox or IE.

IE7's interface is horrible and I believe it's a tad slower than what it used to be.  Sure it's a little more secure than IE 6 but why risk it when Firefox and Opera exist?

Opera is a browser that is faster (at least on Windows) and more secure than Firefox.  In addition, it has more features built-in and still uses memory than Firefox without extensions.  Speaking of which, if you're not using extensions such as Adblock Plus and DownThemAll you're better off using something else if you're on Windows and haven't compiled Fx yourself.

Supposedly Firefox 3 will be faster since they're ditching some legacy code but we'll have to see.