Vista reformat

Joined: Oct 11, 2006 Posts: 916

Hey guys.

Planning on wiping clean and starting again on our second PC. It's running Vista Home Premium. It's the original oem install from the system builder and I have the original serial etc. What I don't seem to be able to find since moving house though is the disc.

If I can get hold of a non infected ISO of the same OS from somewhere would it work with the serial I have? I know it works fine on normal software, any reason Vista wouldn't accept it?

Joined: Nov 12, 2007 Posts: 398

Nah you will be fine as long as the serial number is legit.

Joined: Oct 11, 2006 Posts: 916

Cool.

Trying to cobble together something that can play the dual core min spec games such as Mass Effect 2 and of course BC2 with as close to zero an outlay as possible.

Have an E4400 with just 1 gig of ddr2 or 2gig of older pc3200 so looking at new cpu and memory. The e4400 @ 2gig is allegedly min spec for bc2 but I don't much fancy the idea of trying seeing as how cpu heavy it is from other peoples comments.Using the bits out of this system should then get me something vaguely resembling a gaming machine and be able to get back online! Might take a while to sort it without a lottery win but you haven't seen the back of me yet. Smile

Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 1:12 pm

C'mon the Kop!!! It will be great to see you back m8 Very Happy

cough*Wigan*cough

Joined: Oct 11, 2006 Posts: 916

Sorry fella, the second line of your message was indecipherable.

Something to do with a southern shandy drinking type trying to sound like a dirty Manc makes it hard to follow. Laughing

Community Founder Joined: Jun 30, 2005 Posts: 3628

2 gb ram with vista Confused

Vista for gaming must have at least 4gb... I guess for normal PC use you can get by with just 2gb.
Vista just on the desktop will use 800mb of ram Shocked

Basically when gaming you will find a fair bit of lag at times when the ram usage needs to go over 2gb and it starts to hit the paging file.
Cheers
|2es-mrix

Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 2:42 pm

try the forums here for a copy of vista http://forums.mydigitallife.info/index.php
as mrix said, if intended for gaming would go the win 7 way as not as taxing as vista. cough,pm me for win 7 link, cough.
i have 4 gig of corsair xms2 pc6400 ram sitting in a box doing nothing. bought for rogue jnr's pc, but it wont run double sided ram in adjacent slots. what chipsets on your m/b. you can have it for a tenner, cost me 40 and never been used.
does your motherboard allow overclocking? could be a cheaper route rather than a cpu, can get a good cooler for sub 20 quid. you will need to swat up on it to avoid any misshaps, but all the intel core duo's overclock really well. worth a thought if money short. i got my q6600 running at 3.3ghz from 2.4 ghz std quite easily. never gets warm and cooler only cost me about 15 squid.

Joined: Oct 11, 2006 Posts: 916

Yeah I know I need more memory.

Board I have available is intel 945G chipset;
P5L-VM

Not sure what effect of putting that ram in would be? would it just run at the speed the board allows or cause issues?

Honestly never looked into over-clocking as I am as clumsy in real life as in game. Considering it but if there are nine ok ways to do something and only one to mess it up, i'll find that one way nine times out of ten!

As for win7.. I'd happily ditch vista in favour of it but i'd have to give some thought to going down that route for an OS.

Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 3:20 pm

Even I have win7 now Kop! XP has be put in a grave Wink

Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 3:40 pm

just checked for you and it appears that board will only support upto 667MHZ ram, the sticks i have are 800MHZ.
the motherboard has a 1066MHZ bus speed. would be easier to overclock with a 1333MHZ bus speed as you just select that speed in the bios and it instantly overclocks the cpu without having to increase fsb voltage. can still be done, just not quite so easy, and by not as much.
if you go for 4 gig of any ram you will need a 64 bit OS, i suspect your vista will only be 32 bit. so can only see a max of 4 gig (take away the 512MB of ram on graphics card leaves 3.5 gig, hence some of ram would not be used).
With that board you could only upgrade to a cpu with 1066MHZ bus speed. most of newer ones now run at 1333MHZ.
you should be able to pick up a quicker cpu and some extra ram for quite cheap though.

Posted: Tue Mar 09, 2010 3:45 pm

core 2 duo e6600 3 GHZ £71.95 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/193593
ram seems a little expensive, 4 gig kit here - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/142343 £65 though.

Joined: Oct 11, 2006 Posts: 916

Cheers Rogue.

Got some thinking to do as I really don't have any cash to spare right now. Tempted to take up your offer on the RAM and see what happens as reading around, in a lot of instances the higher rated ram will work at the lower speed.

Joined: Oct 11, 2006 Posts: 916

Just got the mexican version running on my old single core cpu. It's a bit chuggy when it's busy but 'just' about playable.

Not sure I want to risk the horrible constant deaths online with this performance but it's given me hope that I can get it running when i chop up mine and the lads system to make one 'slightly less crap than the two separate systems'.