2 crucial questions

M

Moonsavior

New Member
I have two questions I hope to be answered.

1.) I am going to purchase a legal copy of an OS next week, but I am undecided whether it should be the new Vista home premium or the latest XP pro. I am more inclined to purchase a newer OS, but I would like some expert opinions based on my system spec's ability to be able to handle Vista or not.

My system's specs:

Intel Pentium 4 630 Prescott 3.0GHz 2MB L2 Cache LGA 775 EM64T Processor

ASUS P5RD1-VM LGA 775 ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

CHAINTECH SE6600/256 GeForce 6600 DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card

Kingston ValueRAM 512MB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)

Kingston ValueRAM 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200)

Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial
ATA150 Hard Drive

I also have an older drive at 80gb but can't remember the details of it, but it works very good and is only 3-4 years old.

2.) The Raptor HD I have listed as one of my specs isn't installed yet. It will arrive next week. Once it does, I will go out and purchase an OS. My current illegal copied OS runs on a old and dying HD that I want to discard before installing an new OS. My question is how would I go about installing the new OS onto the new Raptor drive? I assume I must remove the old HD and then put in the Raptor HD then start the pc up where I guess I will be prompted to put in the new OS installation cd-rom. Is this true? And also, would I have to reintall any my specs? If so, would I need their cd-roms or disks?
 
you should get xp pro, recent benchmarks show vista actually decreases system performance.

as for installation, if its the retailed boxed version there should be instructions or there should also be instructions in your motherboard manual. Its pretty staright forward.
 
Are you Vista ready? Microsoft lists the minimum system requirements at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/capable.mspx DO you want Vista? I'll be waiting for the Vista SP2 release to see if they get all of the bugs out!

Installing Windows on a sata drive requires first creating a floppy with the necessary sata drivers on it. Sometimes the installer won't detect the drive as seen on a friend's recent build when trying to a 200gb sata drive as a stand alone. The bios has to set for sata/raid otherwise the ide controller will override it as default. With the old drive in you could use the disk management tool to partition and then format the new drive. This would make it easier for the installer to detect it and see Windows installed later once the old drive was removed.

I run 2gb(two 1gb dimms) of Kingston DDR400 PC3200 Value Ram here. Swapping the 512mb for a 1gb could see the slight performance boost there with the increase to even things out on both memory channels.
 
Stick with XP Pro. I've tested Vista Beta 2 and the Final Versions and while the final version of vista was much better than the beta, the performance is still not as good as xp.

One of the first things I tested was frame rates in counter strike source. I got about 15fps less in vista than I did in xp....if I was getting 60fps i would only get 45fps. This is probably has something to do with the poor driver support for vista from nvidia and ati so I'm hoping it will improve over the next few months. For now you should stay with xp if you want all the performance you can get.
 
I took the latest ubuntu 6.10 live cd/install disk and found that took far longer to load then XP Home! Just like XP took a few years for Microsoft to get it running good you can imagine Vista will also need a few fixes. You'll notice they took longer releasing it compared to the earlier versions of Windows. Now we'll see how long it takes to correct the initial bugs still to be found.
 
PC eye said:
I took the latest ubuntu 6.10 live cd/install disk and found that took far longer to load then XP Home! Just like XP took a few years for Microsoft to get it running good you can imagine Vista will also need a few fixes. You'll notice they took longer releasing it compared to the earlier versions of Windows. Now we'll see how long it takes to correct the initial bugs still to be found.
Click to expand...

why are you comparing linux live disk, which would obvioursly take longer to load, to windows xp home?

here is a set of real world bench marks comparing windwos vista and windows xp

http://techgage.com/article/windows_vista_system_performance_reports
 
PC eye said:
Are you Vista ready? Microsoft lists the minimum system requirements at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/capable.mspx DO you want Vista? I'll be waiting for the Vista SP2 release to see if they get all of the bugs out!

Installing Windows on a sata drive requires first creating a floppy with the necessary sata drivers on it. Sometimes the installer won't detect the drive as seen on a friend's recent build when trying to a 200gb sata drive as a stand alone. The bios has to set for sata/raid otherwise the ide controller will override it as default. With the old drive in you could use the disk management tool to partition and then format the new drive. This would make it easier for the installer to detect it and see Windows installed later once the old drive was removed.

I run 2gb(two 1gb dimms) of Kingston DDR400 PC3200 Value Ram here. Swapping the 512mb for a 1gb could see the slight performance boost there with the increase to even things out on both memory channels.
Click to expand...


you don't always have to install the drivers off a floppy, sometimes the motherboard comes pre installed with them
 
Impr3ssiv3 said:
you don't always have to install the drivers off a floppy, sometimes the motherboard comes pre installed with them
Click to expand...

he's actually right about this one, there are tons of SATA controllers not supported by the OS installer and require third party (hit F6) drivers to be loaded during initial set up. This is annoying beacuse the windows xp installer only accpets drivers from a floppy drive.

I have only not had to load SATA controller drivers once out of 100s of systems I loaded windows on. Vista is suppose to address this issue.
 
tlarkin said:
he's actually right about this one, there are tons of SATA controllers not supported by the OS installer and require third party (hit F6) drivers to be loaded during initial set up. This is annoying beacuse the windows xp installer only accpets drivers from a floppy drive.

I have only not had to load SATA controller drivers once out of 100s of systems I loaded windows on. Vista is suppose to address this issue.
Click to expand...

yes he is, but i am also right. My motherboard already had the drivers and i didnt have to use a floppy
 
The fact that some boards now seen have an onboard controller similar to a bios in a sense is mainly seen on boards without two ide channels. Those are strictly sata boards not having an ide primary controller to override sata. The bios on those provides the Windows installer with the drive information there.

This allows XP installer to partition and format the drive as it proceeds to copy the installation files. For those still running boards with ide as default it's driver time!
 
PC eye said:
...The bios on those provides the Windows installer with the drive information there.

This allows XP installer to partition and format the drive as it proceeds to copy the installation files. For those still running boards with ide as default it's driver time!
Click to expand...

Not exactly. During the boot strap process once the system boots from an OS disk the BIOS no longer controls the hardware at all, the OS does. In the scenerio we are discussing its actually the OS installer here. The problem is not the BIOS it is the HUGE lack of third party driver support in the windows installer, and the fact that the installer only supports drivers being loaded from a floppy disk. This is suppose to be fixed in vista, but we will still see the hit F6 to load third party controller support. The only main difference this time is that you should be able to browse to other media besides floppy to load it. Now of course then the manufactuterers and developers would have to make sure that the driver is in its native format (.inf) and not embeded in an installer or applicaiton. I highly doubt the windows installer would actually know to extract a driver from like an .msi or .exe file.
 
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