Installing Vista

[Guest]

hello,

I have some questions about windows Vista, I have a Dell XPS 710 with 4 GB
ram and dual cards of Nvidia Geforce 7950 GX2.

1-Should I install the retail version of windows vista or should I wait to
get it from Dell (Is the Dell version technicaly better for my system like
for example it may has additional drivers) ?

2- I have understood that if I bought the Vista Ultimate upgrade DVD
(retail) it contains both the x86 and x64 editions, so first if I want to
install the x64 eddition can I boot from the dvd and do a clean install with
formatting the harddisk? Second if later I would like to install the x86
eddition how can I do that?

Thank you...

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

The Vista Ultimate retail editions, both upgrade and full, include two
dvd's. The combined size of x86 and x64 is greater than 5GB so they would
not both fit on the same 4.2 GB dvd. Dual layer dvd's are not available.

I have not seen very many reports on the x64 upgrade edition, but what is
clear is that you boot the system with the x64 dvd to install an x64 upgrade
edition. After you enter the UE pk Setup scans the computer to verify that
you have a qualifying copy of Windows installed and then proceeds. Since
you are not running the legacy OS (you booted with the dvd) the system
volume is not in use and you should be able to format it prior to installing
Vista. It still needs to be confirmed that you can format the system
volume, but I don't see why not. This only applies to x64.

If you first install x64 and later want to change to x86 things are
different. Although you can run the x86 Setup from the Vista x64 desktop,
you cannot use the upgrade option. Unfortunately my experiments with this
scenario showed that the custom install option should be blocked also. A
custom install of Vista x86 onto a volume containing an x64 OS simply did
not work correctly. The result was a mixture of x86 and x64 program folders
that is confusing to the user beyond belief. Setup did not rollup the x64
files into a windows.old folder like it is supposed to. It was an unholy
mess.

What you need to do to switch from x86 to x64 is to clean install XP and run
the vista x86 upgrade edition on that.

 

[google]

I have an XPS 710 with 4Gb ram. Currently, Vista 64-bit does NOT
install on this system, it Blue Screens on setup. The 32-bit version
does work, however. although depending which video card you got with
yours, you may still have problems. These should be sorted when
drivers are updated, although no telling how long that will be at this
rate...

 

[Mark]

I have an XPS 710 with 4Gb ram. Currently, Vista 64-bit does NOT
install on this system, it Blue Screens on setup. The 32-bit version
does work, however. although depending which video card you got with
yours, you may still have problems. These should be sorted when
drivers are updated, although no telling how long that will be at this
rate...

I installed the 64 bit OEM version on my Gateway. 2 gigs of ram and a 100GB
hard drive. Installed fine and works great. It's actually faster than than
XP Pro. The only problem I see is, under device manager, the drivers for
"Mass Storage Controller" aren't installed. No updated on Gateway site.