Installing Vista on the new computer – What I needed to know

Windows CeMeNt

Installing Vista on the new computer – What I needed to know

Installing Vista was not so bad. Really. I know, I know. “But, Phokal, Vista sucks #$#@.” or “Vista is ME’s and XP’s bastard grandchild.”

But on this machine, Vista has been as smooth as butter. UAC isn’t annoying when it is up and gone in under a second.

Not to mention, if I want to use more than 2 gigs of ram (3 in special circumstances), then I have to go 64 bit. And we all know how much worse XP 64 bit is in terms of driver support. I currently have 4 gigs, and for 80 bucks more I can bump that up to 8. Seeing as how I’m sitting at 2gigs used as I write this, I think it good to get more.

Anyway, Vista installed and detected almost every driver I needed for basic work. I could install without loading an sata controller, and use the internet without a seperate network driver. I needed 3 drivers once I was in Windows:

Mobo Chipset and Mobo Audio (didn’t need the rest):

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Support/Motherboard/Driver_Model.aspx?ProductID=2744

Video Card:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us

**Important note: until I installed the what-i-thought-was-optional audio driver, if I plugged in my speakers in the the top 3 back panel plugs (bottom 3, front 2 all worked fine), then vista would hang on shutdown, and subsequent boot up would freeze every 10 seconds. I have NO IDEA how or why.

I choose to put everything on a single 500 gig partition, rather than cut it up. I plan to use Music, Picture, and other folders as windows intends and see how that works out. I will have 2 other harddrives installed, which I plan to have applications (when given the option, like Gimp/Photoshop) to store their temp storage or workspace there. This should help in keeping my main drive from fragmentation. My last computer had 4 drives, each was cut in half. It was a pain in the ass to manage, despite easier to perform maintanence scans. I would run out of room on a partition, and wouldn’t even know (without checking in Drive Management) if I COULD stretch the partition out to reclaim space on the same hdd. Not that I even have the ability to: those apps often haven’t worked for me in the past.

My machine, so far, seems stable. I plan to purchase Sisoft Sandra software to perform a burn in test, when I get the opportunity. I have named my machine: beh3moth. Mattlindh named his Leviath4n

I’ve gotten all the Windows Updates. So now, the next step is to migrate over my 2 other harddrives and capture card, and turn this beast into a media center. Stay tuned.

4 thoughts on “Installing Vista on the new computer – What I needed to know

  1. Is the next step setting up the media server or installing SP1? I’m eagerly awaiting your report on SP1 and a report on bug fixes. I think you know the main one I want to know about, but it will be interesting to see how other issues are resolved.

  2. same here. It has been quite stable. Explorer crashed once when I had two seperate file transfers going, and then tried to play a game of Neverwinter Nights 2.

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