Current thinking on Windows Vista and E-Prime?

[Gary Samson]

Earlier this year there were concerns about the reliability of E-Prime
under Vista (timing accuracy was one issue). What is the current
thinking on Vista and E-Prime. Is it still a combination to avoid?

Gary Samson, Senior Experimental Officer
Department of Psychology
University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NP
Tel: 01227 823079 Fax: 01227 827030
www.kent.ac.uk/psychology

[Michiel Spape]

Hi,
Few people like Vista much and I think that is the main reason they are reluctant to running critical stuff on it. However, personally, I never had problems with running E-Prime on vista, although I did not make sure in any technical manner. If timing is your main concern, I would suggest running those timer tests from the E-Prime site, preferably on a pc that has both vista and winxp on it. Vista does include quite a number of tools to tweak all kinds of extra processes, but it will take a little time to get it right - I would urge not to just use your e-prime on a fresh install (for example, you do not want it to reboot during an experiment because of updates!), but then, that goes for xp too.
Cheers,
Mich

Michiel Spapé
Research Fellow
Perception & Action group
University of Nottingham
School of Psychology

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[David McFarlane]

Nothing has changed with regard to reliability of E-Prime 2 under
Vista. Note that the latest build of EP2 (2.0.8.22) was released
over a year ago on 21 May 2008, and nothing has changed since
then. So all the reported problems remain: Delays and crashes when
playing sound (http://support.pstnet.com/forum/Topic1361-12-1.aspx ),
crashes when playing movies
(http://support.pstnet.com/forum/Topic1850-4-1.aspx ), anomalies in
measured response times
(http://support.pstnet.com/forum/Topic2994-12-1.aspx ).

In short, DO NOT use Vista for E-Prime 2! E-Prime 1, by contrast,
does seem to work OK under Vista. Nevertheless, I would go even
further to insist that Vista not be used for running any experiments,
as Vista simply has not proved itself reliable for laboratory use in
the way that XP has. OK though to use Vista for *developing* the
experiment programs and then move them to XP machines for running
subjects, if you can get through the occasional glitches during
development -- that's what I do.

-- David McFarlane, Professional Faultfinder

[Daniel Zajdel]

My lab will be hanging on to WinXP for as long as possible. I have definitely seen the timing issue with Vista and I don't forsee Windows7 to be any better.

Neurology
Oregon Health & Science University

________________________________

From: e-p...@googlegroups.com on behalf of Gary Samson
Sent: Fri 8/28/2009 3:27 AM
To: E-Prime
Subject: Current thinking on Windows Vista and E-Prime?

[susie]

I bought an XP machine in June after having problems with my new Vista
machines. Vista was unable to run sounds with the correct timing even
with pre-release and other changes (eg buffering to streaming or vice
versa).

--Susie

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