I am getting a new computer soon. It should be a pretty standard desktop, no fancy gimmicks, but plenty to run NWN which is pretty much all I play nowadays.

That being said, I've heard snippets about how Windows Vista doesn't react well to the engine NWN uses or something like that, or maybe it has something to do with newer graphics cards. Whatever it is, if such problems exist, I'd like to be prepared to handle them immediately.

What steps should I take to prepare for this computer upgrade with such a well aged game like NWN? Aged well! Like steaks and wines mind you!

For all the gripes I hear about Vista, my non-complaining words are usually drowned out or disregarded. With the exception of some aesthetic anomalies that I dislike, Vista performs no worse for me than XP did. I can run NWN as well as all of my other games with almost no problems beyond the occasional crash to desktop or computer crash (and then only with the more graphics-intensive games, no issues with NWN whatsoever to report). Most of those issues are due to the design of the laptop and its largely unsupported graphics card.

And even if you -did- have issues running certain programs, Vista has compatibility modes that can usually cope with older games. But hell, I can run Diablo 1 on this thing without using computability.

You should not even use vista.

I have heard of a lot of problems with newer graphics cards not being able to run that, though i know Nevidia have released a new series of Drivers which have fixed the problem of NWN not running right.

The only Vista problem I have is that some textures are not displayed properly, everything else has been running fine.

I've been told getting the newest drivers helps. I'm too lazy to test this out.

Thanks Sec, that was helpful. Problem is, I'm not likely to buy a weird video card, in fact, I'm probably buying NVidia because I'm somewhat familiar with it and seems the best for the price.

I hear you Relinq, but I need reasons. :( Why shouldn't I use Vista? Nothing else is going to support DirectX 10. That's kind of important...

Mikky, that's a start. Can anyone follow up and tell me what's up?

Oro, if you killed all of Traensyr -1 with a kobold I'm inclined to believe that you killed JFK. Defend yourself! Oh, and how bad are the texture problems? What happens? Also, what video card are you using?

A friend on another server had a problem with a newer video card so i did some research into it.

http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=563988&forum=49

http://nwn.bioware.com/forums/viewtopic.html?topic=609561&forum=49

As i said she had problems i believe hers where that she would play for an hour then the screen would go black and she would have to reboot the game, she downloaded the newest drivers though and it appears that they have fixed a lot of the problems. From what i remember this is because when they built the new drivers they didn't excpect anyone to be playing games as old as NWN and as such had not bothered to support them. (i think this was one of the reasons at least)

As for Vista i have found some links

http://boards.ign.com/neverwinter_nights/b6644/141614987/p1/