a Vista epiphany

i bought my computer last year in February. it is an HP with Vista. it's always handled SL okay, but laggy and slow, blah blah blah

i recently reformatted, this time using the Vista Home Premium stand alone, not the HP version that came with the computer.

doing jsut that, my FPS has gone from an average of 1-4 to an average of 17-35....

okay, it was the HP add ons that were craeting such grief for me. i even sold my land over it.

anyway, for those who ask about Vista as a future purchase, it seems to be great. to those who are using the HP version that came with your new computer.... spend the extra $$$ and buy the stand alone.

Everything on my computer is running with a boost of rocket fuel or something... what i mean is... WOW!

Great to hear a positive post!!!!!!!!! We need more news like this!

That is great news 3Ring!

Awsum! Have not had problems with the HP version but..

Great News. I am running the Dell Provided Vista and that may be the problem with my machine as well.

Now I have to sell my first born child to purchase a copy.

"CX"

Anyone tried to re-partition their Vista enabled PC and install Win XP? I told the guy when I bought mine that I play Second Life, I have so much ram I don't notice any slow downs.

I've had a somewhat similar experience, having just upgraded to a new 20" iMac. it really highlighted for me how much lag and other glitchiness I had was viewer side, and due to having a somewhat underpowered computer.

Not everyting is LLs fault. Well, okay, maybe this one thing.

Mari

What you can also do , although time consuming, is what I do with the Dell supplied XP. When I reformat I manually remove all the trial programs and such.

I've been trying to sort out my constant crashing with Vista, and it's certainly not LL's fault; it's something to do with the nVidia forceware drivers running with Vista. The problem I am suffering from seems to be a very common one (I think restricted to certain mobos), and it manifests itself with anything that's above average graphic intensive. Bloody nVidiots.

If I'm right, you have to re-partition your drive if your going to convert from Vista to XP, otherwise you won't have removed the previous OS.

Something I found the other day...closing the Windows SideBar application greatly improved my FPS on SL. I'm sure most of the systems that have Vista pre-installed, have the Windows SideBar running at Windows start-up.

If you're seeing really slow FPS, try exiting the Windows Sidebar.

In general, whenever you get a new PC it is full of absolute rubbish, badly installed by the manufacturer - this is particularly true for Sony machines I am told. It is always a good idea to completely re-install, I find.

If you paid for a copy of Windows (of whatever stripe) with your machine, which you will have done, you are entitled to receive a Windows install disc that allows you to do this with a licence key and everything. Some companies are reluctant to do so, but you did actually pay for the software. They do sometimes brand it as a "restore disc" but in practice it should allow you to do a clean install without all of their "helpful add-ons". You will have to add in the proper drivers for yourself, but that is usually quite simple.

HP machines generally do not come with recovery CD's, they do have the software in a seperate partition which can be used with your PC's recovery option or burned to CD.

Nope you're wrong.

A reformat will suffice.

Same as going from 2000 to XP

Same with Dell machines.

I've always repartitioned my drives, I hate to waste any space in unused partitions.

But you won't... Vista is fully compatable with NTFS and can see the partitions

Reformatting will wipe them clean.

Unless formating and particitioning of hard drives have changed with Vista (which I really doubt has) formating a drive will not wipe the particitions clean unless you format both or all the particittions on the hard drive. Even then you will still see the particitions. They will just be unused space on each particition (which the OS sees as separate drives). You can delete the particitions then format and it will free up the whole HD. Or you can wipe the HD using a wipe utility such as "Killdisk" which writes random zeros and ones to every sector on the disk. A very long process but pretty much takes of everything that is written to disk including particitions.

Peggy I'd wager a healthy sum your correct. I've been told even by the manuafacturer that formatting a machine with Vista (without touching the partitions) and installing XP will in fact give you two operating systems.

My hard drive isn't partitioned, it's just one "C" drive. Should it be partitioned? Will it make any difference?

The drive letter and partition are not directly linked. Your drive more than likely has a DOS partition or an NTFS partition. It would not be something visible in explorer.

Well, that's either very cheap of them (if they have a full Windows install disc image on the partition which you can burn afterwards - not prepared to shell out for the cost of a CD, Dell?) or fraudulent (if they don't, since if you pay for Windows you should be getting a proper working copy that you can install as and when you like).

I've had PCs which have had partitions with OEM software on them myself, but it wasn't the OS - it was drivers and "free extras" i.e. three-year-old versions of software that was bad in the first place. The OS came on a separate disc.

Not that I actually use Windows very often, but if I'd paid for it I'd expect to actually _get_ it. Particularly given the cost of buying Vista outright!

I imagine manufacturers got tired of requests for replacement OS cd's that were lost, damaged, etc. Now they just place the OS in a seperate partition and give the users the "Recovery" option at startup.

(double)

That would seem like a rather poor excuse for them not to send a CD _at all_, if that were the case. They are not obliged to replace things that people have lost, but they are obliged to provide things that people have paid for....