4. No Hardware Audio

During development, Microsoft removed a couple of crucial gaming-audio related features from Vista, including DirectSound 3D (hundreds of games use DS3D to deliver positional 5.1 audio) and support for hardware accelerated 3D sound. This isn’t a problem for new games going forward, as most developers have embraced the alternative OpenAL technology, which will continue to work in Vista. It is, however, a problem for legacy DS3D games, such as Call of Duty 2 and Max Payne. When you run a DirectSound 3D game on Vista, it won’t give you the option to enable 3D sound or features that require hardware acceleration, such as EAX. Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution. Creative will release its Alchemy application, a workaround to a problem that shouldn’t exist in the first place. Alchemy is basically a wrapper program—it intercepts DirectSound 3D functions and converts them to OpenAL functions using a custom DLL. Alchemy works OK, but we’d much rather have a less-kludgy solution from Microsoft. Hopefully, they’ll hear our cries and include hardware support with Vista’s first service pack.

5. Vista Doesn't Work With a Lot of Bleeding-Edge Hardware

The BIOS on the laptop you bought in March doesn’t work with Vista. Nor does your high-end USB microphone. And you can kiss that joystick-port-based Thrustmaster flight stick goodbye, too. With any new operating system, it’s safe to assume there are going to be some compatibility problems. However, we experienced more issues with our hardware just plain not working during the Vista run-up than we did with any Microsoft OS since Windows 2000. The lesson here? Make sure your hardware is actually compatible with Vista before you purchase it. You can check by using the Vista Upgrade Advisor.

6. Vista Doesn't Work Well With Some Games

We’ve already talked about the excision of 3D sound from the operating system, but there’s a larger problem. It turns out that many online games that use PunkBuster to limit cheating require Administrator access in order to work properly. The problem is that neither the game, PunkBuster, nor Vista actually tells you that. You just get kicked from the server every time you try to join a game. The solution is relatively simple: All you have to do is set the offending game to always run as an Administrator in its Properties window, but the entire process needs to be more user-friendly. Please get to work on this, Microsoft.