Vista is not good for multimedia…..

To check capability of GMA X3100 graphics core, I downloaded trailer of 10000 B.C..
The resolution of the video is 1920×800.

and I tried to play it on Vista (Vista Home Basic 32-bit),
Result: flickering playback, video was running in frames

I thought, I should have bought nVidia 8400GS card, which was an option with Dell 1420.

Googling told me that the card is much capable in doing this.
Then what went wrong???

I tried the video on Ubuntu 7.10 (I keep dualboot) and it was playing beautifully…
that means card and hardware was not the problem…

XP never had such problems, it was great for multimedia point of view.

I still could not believe that vista is unable to play a video.
so I reinstalled the vista and driver from intel website (latest).
but the result was same.

MediaPlayers I tried were VLC 0.8.6, The KMPlayer and QuickTime 7.

May be it was the problem of driver but i tried two versions of intel graphics driver.

What I concluded with all this was Vista is really lacking in the field where windows was strong.

All I say is - Best of luck, Microsoft !!!