Hello everyone,

Today I found out one of my hard drives heat shield broke and I decided to go ahead and buy another one. While looking around online I saw:

Newegg.com - G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory - Desktop Memory

Newegg.com - Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 32-bit English 1pk for System Builders DSP OEI DVD - Operating Systems

I was thinking about buying Vista Ultimate 32 and 4gb of memory. Mainly I game and do video editing / graphic design. I have been told that Home Premium sometimes is the better choice then Ultimate because it has a lot of unnecessary things.. Was hoping for some info on all of this and perhaps some advice on weather or not it's a good idea. I'm running XP Pro 32 SP2 right now. Here is my system hardware:

Newegg.com - EVGA 122-CK-NF68-A1 LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard

Newegg.com - EVGA 640-P2-N825-AR GeForce 8800GTS 640MB 320-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card

Newegg.com - PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad (Black) EPS12V 750W Power Supply 100 - 240 V UL, ULC, CE, CB, RoHS

Newegg.com - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 Processor

Newegg.com - OCZ Gold 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory

Newegg.com - Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme CPU Cooler


Thanks for the help

Stay with XP. The world has realized that Vista was a Microsoft experiment that did not pan out. All of us are waiting to see what Windows 7 will look like.

If you buy a new computer and it has Vista on it that isn't a bad thing, you just need to relearn the OS and figure out where to go for tweaking. It has all the stuff that XP has and includes visual bells and whistles. If you get the 32bit you may run into some application issues that need to be resolved, but nothing like you would run into with a 64bit version.

Vista will end up being the catalyst for Microsoft redirection more so than anything they've ever done before. Well, let's hope it is a catalyst. Otherwise they will go under.

Hmm interesting, is their any way to get 4gb of memory to work on XP without emulation?

4GB(+) will work in 64-bit XP. You can install 4GB in an XP32 machine, you just won't "see" more than 3~3.5GB being used, due to a limitation with the 32-bit version (can't remember off the top of my head). With XP64, you should be able to install as much memory as your motherboard will allow, all the way up to TBs, IIRC.

i'm running 4gb of that ram (gskill) on xp x32 sp3.it sees 3.25gb, but memory usage is so low that the missing amount isn't noticeable.
if you do get it, follow the recommendations and bump the voltage.my timings are 4-4-4-10@400mhz @2v

Excellent, thank you for the replies everyone. I think what I am going to do is buy Vista 32 ultimate and the 4gb memory. I have heard of people installing XP and Vista for different applications, I would like to give that a shot so I can retain my xp functionality and learn the vista interface at the same time. I am fairly inexperienced with setting up multiple operating systems on the same machine but I'm sure this forum has some great posts to point me in the right direction Thanks again to everyone who has helped me out.

Eh, really... vista... naaa

and if you go through with it anyways... remember that vista doesn't use boot.ini anymore. install vista first, then xp.

I was extremely anti-Vista, but after trying it five times over the past year and a half I'm finally happy with it. Hardware support has come on massively, and I've had no driver issues using the 64-bit version at all.

It does need a seriously fast PC though. I stuck it on my laptop (2.2ghz Core 2, 2gb RAM) and it was so slow I took it off.

Yeah thats why I bought 2 extra gigs

Quote: Originally Posted by BigAkita Vista will end up being the catalyst for Microsoft redirection more so than anything they've ever done before. Well, let's hope it is a catalyst. Otherwise they will go under.

Buddy of mine works for product dev @ Microsoft. I won't leak his name to protect the innocent. But he essentially said, "Microsoft tried to do too much w/ Vista." He also said that Windows7 already corrects so many things they did wrong in Vista, and it's nowhere near its release date (EOY 2009). I suppose that will be the OS I migrate to after XP, but right now, there's no compelling reason.

-godling

My suggestion is sticking with XP and even upgrading to SP3 instead of going to vista. I tried to use Vista x64 to get the full use of my ram and it ran fine and dandy, but I didn't like how it handles overall. The system ran about as fast as my XP setup does now and I would much rather have a system that uses less ram to run than to have one that chews up ram and having the little extra unused ram.

Quote: Originally Posted by reflux I was extremely anti-Vista, but after trying it five times over the past year and a half I'm finally happy with it. Hardware support has come on massively, and I've had no driver issues using the 64-bit version at all. It does need a seriously fast PC though. I stuck it on my laptop (2.2ghz Core 2, 2gb RAM) and it was so slow I took it off.

that's probably because of your HD , most laptop have 5400 rpm HD compare to a 7200 rpm it's really a slow drive

pcstats has some good vista beginners guides.

Cool I'll check that out. The install went great today. Bought a 500gb hdd and oddly enough everything works perfectly. Adjusted the memory timings to 4-4-4-12 @ 2.0v. Scored a 5.9 on everything but my memory which was 5.0 for the vista experience index thing. Now I need to figure out how to get rid of these god damn annoying confirmation boxes that appear any time something is being installed..etc. And how to optimize vista.

The only way you will know if it is working perfectly is to run some benchmarks under Vista and then re-run them under XP. With my limited experience with Vista I still believe there is a lot more overhead involved with the new OS.

I've heard some great things about Windows 7, including a version able to run on a flash drive. I am sure that Vista will end up being a repeat of ME and will want to be quickly forgotten by MS. I am not going to hitch my horse to an OS that MS has already stated they will be replacing.

I am not one of those guys who hate change, I adopted XP quickly after I was sure that it was a better OS than 98. I adopted 98 once I was sure it surpassed 95. Same goes with every previous version of Windows. I am just not convinced that paying MS for Vista is going to be a better decision than staying with XP until Windows 7 is released.

the pop-ups are the uac kicking in.right-click your user name in the start menu and look for the settings option to disable uac.

i actually have no problems with vista other than its (at the time) slow implementation of DX9 backwards compatability.

this might amaze a few people, but i was running vista32bit professional on a single stick of 512mb pc3200, a 1.8ghz opteron, and an x850xt and its performance wasnt bad at all, i was even able to play the majority of my older dx9 games pretty well....albeit with about a 10fps hit (ballpark), and this was while running every ounce of eye-candy vista had to offer.

the only reason i ended up ditching it was because of the really poor performance in world of warcraft, that was the single reason i dropped vista...wow ran slow

petty

Microsoft looks to 'Mojave' to revive Vista's image | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News.com

STFU vista haters

i don't hate vista,i hate its start menu.i keep my taskbar on the right side of the screen and the menu is a pita.kde4 is the same way, but at least with it i can switch it to classic style that works for my placement.

For me, its not that I hate vista, I'm more pissing at my hardware that they company that made them is too lazy to create new drivers.