A small but significant number of games written for Windows XP either crash or creep along slowly on Vista, according to numerous complaints by game enthusiasts in online forums.
"Formatted PC, installed Vista, updated any drivers possible. Now half [of my] games will not run, or run with corrupt graphics," lamented one poster on Jan. 31 in a discussion forum at graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp.'s Web site.
"You installed Vista. You deserve your problems. Heh," replied a second poster.
Most of the problems have been found in popular first-person shooter games such as CounterStrike, Half-Life 2, Doom 3 and F.E.A.R.
Games, especially first-person shooters, tend to strain a PC's graphics capabilities much more than business or even multimedia applications.