agreed, vista is very nice, did not think i would be that easily swayed from xp

Hi Hmmm
your house sounds as mad as ours we have 4 DELL desktops and one laptop we did have 5 but it moved away along with our eldest when he left to make his fortune in the big city :) they are all networked by cable apart from the laptop that goes wireless - I installed a bluetooth module recently to my laptop bought on ebay from a DELL reseller for 99p! a real bargin and a sinch to fit!

My vista that I bought was an OEM version here is the blurb from 1 reveiw.

Ok first off OEM means its tied to your motherboard, as long as you dont change that you can activate on your pc as many times just like xp. The software checks key components and makes a code, if you change too many items it will ask you to phone up but you can reactivate.

There is no differnce between any of the discs supplied its the key you enter that determins what features you get.

oem version contains all the features of the retail just no manuals etc. (although it comes with a good install guide)

AND YOU DO NOT NEED A SYSTEM BUILDER ID NOR ARE YOU ASKED FOR ANY SUCH CODE THATS COMPLETE RUBBISH

INSTALL

install is easy but your best bet is to make sure you backup your photos etc or move them to a second hard drive or partition.

the best install is a fresh one which is not done from xp. you will loose your xp install but will have a more stable operating system. change your settings in bios to boot from cd dvd and enter disk and reboot.

WHen asked where to install make sure you click advance options and format drive the proceed.

UNTICK activate when start up so that if it goes wrong and you reinstall in the first 30 days you have no activation hassles.

The install takes about twenty minutes.

When started for the first time you will need to activate aero interface via PERSONALIZE and select aero if aviliable to you, then its buisness as usuall.

Problems

Many people report stuttering audio, and the soloution is easy.

Goto control panel then SOUND
right click on your soundcard and click properties.
click on the enhancements tab and click disable all enhancements (there pointless anyway) and the stuttering will stop.

ANTIVIRUS

ok so far i have tried AVG which has problems starting every so often, Kaspersky delays windows startup by 1 min (as informed by the performance tool) and the best one so far is avast and its free.

IE7 has probvlems registering flash so firefox is a must.

Spybot adware nero and roxio all work fine as does newsleecher and any that have problems will have patches.

Anyways go for it its amazing

Hi Digi,
The first link I gave should change to £'s when you say you are in the UK and English etc., doesn't that happen for you?

The price no doubt would be the same if you order a new CD.

I'm not sure if the CD contains all versions and installs the version your PC can handle as they charge differently for each version.

I've gone for one of DELL's cheap and cheerful(ish) Inspiron 1525's. I've bought and set up two recently for clients and been very impressed with them. I went for 3GB RAM and a few other extras so it should be a good general 'family' machine.

I've got 5 other DELLs on the go at the moment(!)- 3 desktops and 2 laptops and been happy with all of them ;¬)



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Hi Hmmm
You wont regret it! I bought a new PC from DELL in February with Vista installed - its brilliant, I was that impressed i bought an OEM copy of Vista and installed it on my DELL laptop, I was meant to be to be able to upgrade my version of XP on my laptop but it kept hanging! so I searched the net for a solution - that was to do a clean install - it formats your C drive and installs the best available VISTa for your machine, so now I have VISTa premium on my laptop :) Its said that if you buy a copy of VISTa it has all the versions on the disk and it installs what your machine can handle. I recently upgraded the RAM on my laptop from 1GB to 2GB and its flying with vista, and in my opinion its more secure than XP, what laptop are you getting? I have an inspiron 6400

thanks for the link but that was in dollars as well and the Microsoft UK site is pants ")
Digi

Hi Digi,

You can buy your licence here.
Edit: Info here.

NB. All my PC's are running XP, on Thursday I just ordered a new Dell Laptop with Vista Ultimate so I can keep up with Vista stuff :¬)




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Has anyone bought an additional licence for Vista? I can only find prices in $ dollars - can you get an additional licence in the UK or do I need to buy another copy of Vista?

Digi