I want to upgrade but Vista is holding me back

Hey guys. I've been wanting to do a full system upgrade for the past 2 months actually, but I had to do lots of homework and catching up on todays technologies since I've been away for about 3 years.

Anyway, I'm about ready to SLI two of those geforce 8800gtx's and get that new nForce 650i mobo, etc, but whats holding me back is installing windows XP on it.

The other day, I decided to upgrade to XP's service pack 2; but the installation froze at 75% and completely locked up my machine. Ever since I rebooted, I've had major issues with many of my programs working. My machine pauses for a good minute during Post tests for some odd reason, and I get prompted to boot from CD. Sometimes I cannot even boot normally, I get told to restart and insert a system boot disk (xp).

Meh, its been a good 4 years since I formatted my HD and started all over again, heck I forgot all the commands to do it but I figured why bother just deal with it, since I will get a new box anyway.

With my recent troubles of attempting to upgrade to SP2, this got me thinking, will I run into any troubles when I upgrade from a barebones windowsXP I will use to install on my new gaming rig, to Vista?

Windows upgrading info: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvist...gradeinfo.mspx

I would probably choose "clean install"

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Clean install
Upgrading to Windows Vista with a clean install means that you should use Windows Easy Transfer to automatically copy all your files and settings to an extra hard drive or other storage device, and then install Windows Vista. After the installation is complete, Windows Easy Transfer will reload your files and settings on your upgraded PC. You will then need to reinstall your applications.

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But these are the questions that are bothering me. Will I need to reinstall all the drivers of my mobo, sli geforce graphics cards, etc? (I dont think so right?)
Will I have to reinstall the programs of the cd's that included the drivers from my hardware? ie-Nvidea's program that lets you access your BIOS from windows and their windows tweak settings straight out of your windows control panel, the Geforce options that monitor your SLI setup and info that runs on your taskbar, etc?

play it safe and just do a format and install, windows is terrible with upgrading and installing over etc, you will have problems.

I agree. Just throw all your documents & media on a temporary partition and then format everything else.

You know if you are going with SLI set up with 8800 GTX, might as well go with 680i chipset.

Wow four year without a reinstall is no joke. That thing must be more messed up then Michael Jackson.

Anyway, you sound more of a user then an admin. I would say get a pre-built system with a nice warranty you don't sound like someone that needs 8800gtx's or the 680i either. Wait till vista is released and get yourself a nice dell with it installed you will save yourself a lot of time and headache.

Thanks, that was a typo I forgot to edit, I shall go with the 680i chipset.
It's been 4 years since I formatted my computer and did a fresh os install, I just flat out completely forgot how to format my HD. I would probably need a guide to a link on how to format and re-install os's. If I could stumble across a good guide I can purchase all the parts I need this Saturday, otherwise I will wait 'till Jan30th and let my pc hardware dealer do it for free since I know the guy.

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Originally Posted by Weedkiller420

Wow four year without a reinstall is no joke. That thing must be more messed up then Michael Jackson.

Anyway, you sound more of a user then an admin. I would say get a pre-built system with a nice warranty you don't sound like someone that needs 8800gtx's or the 680i either. Wait till vista is released and get yourself a nice dell with it installed you will save yourself a lot of time and headache.

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An SLI setup rig from alienware/dell, even with my employee's discount of 12%, will cost me a good 6 grand and having to get monitors, keyboards, drives and other stuff that I do not need with preinstalled software and stuff I am forced to buy that I will just delete when I first get, If I just build it myself I'll save a good 3 grand. I just simply forgot the procedures/commands thats all. If I can find a good guide on formatting and reinstalling os's I should be fine, I've done it a hundred times before, but I forgot many things due to time.

I know other people have mentioned it, but it really needs to be stressed: if you're planning to run 8800 GTXes in SLI, make sure you get a full tower. I made the mistake of buying a mid tower case for my system with a single 8800 GTX, and while I did manage to get everything to fit, it was a real squeeze job, and if I ever want to upgrade to SLI I know I will need to swap out the case.

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Originally Posted by The Boss of Bosses

An SLI setup rig from alienware/dell, even with my employee's discount of 12%, will cost me a good 6 grand and having to get monitors, keyboards, drives and other stuff that I do not need with preinstalled software and stuff I am forced to buy that I will just delete when I first get, If I just build it myself I'll save a good 3 grand. I just simply forgot the procedures/commands thats all. If I can find a good guide on formatting and reinstalling os's I should be fine, I've done it a hundred times before, but I forgot many things due to time.

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Yea good call on building it yourself, you'll save money and relearn everything. You have the forums to help you if you run into any trouble.

Formatting is very simple with windows xp. Just boot from the windows xp cd, delete your windows partition, recreate your windows partition, and then install windows xp to that partition. You'll remember once you boot the cd up.

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Originally Posted by The Boss of Bosses

An SLI setup rig from alienware/dell, even with my employee's discount of 12%, will cost me a good 6 grand and having to get monitors, keyboards, drives and other stuff that I do not need with preinstalled software and stuff I am forced to buy that I will just delete when I first get, If I just build it myself I'll save a good 3 grand. I just simply forgot the procedures/commands thats all. If I can find a good guide on formatting and reinstalling os's I should be fine, I've done it a hundred times before, but I forgot many things due to time.

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I've never heard of any consumer PC in the last 4 years costing $6,000 unless every piece of useless hardware is thrown in there. Where did you get your numbers from?

-Douglas

Holy hell! Out of curiosity, I just went to dell.com to price out the biggest, baddest XPS system, and you're right... damn near hit $6000. How the crap can they charge those kinds of numbers for that hardware??? I hate Dell so much. On their base systems, they cut so many corners to make a $300 PC that you can't trust it any further than you can throw it, but then they overprice everything on the high-end. Why can't they just be fair...

-Douglas

You should visit Alienware. Just for giggles I build custom system. Came out to about 8k, and it's not even SLI! So you need to add another 650 to that to make it SLI.

If you think Alienware is bad, check out Falcon northwest :eek: :eek:

http://www.falcon-nw.com/config/build.asp

You'll crack the $8,000 mark.

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Originally Posted by Weedkiller420

Wow four year without a reinstall is no joke. That thing must be more messed up then Michael Jackson.

Anyway, you sound more of a user then an admin. I would say get a pre-built system with a nice warranty you don't sound like someone that needs 8800gtx's or the 680i either. Wait till vista is released and get yourself a nice dell with it installed you will save yourself a lot of time and headache.

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Here's a questions that goes right along with what you said:

If I havent reinstalled in 3 years BUT I run registry cleaners, spybot programs etc etc (I use 3 different programs each of which have several "cleaning" functions built in - is it REALLY necessary to reinstall?

I know a lot more than your average user and I built my last 3 systems - I just never learned much about the OS side of things - I never want to have to reinstall my applications (if you could see my desk and how unorganized I am in that regard) you would know why...

I'm basically holding on till Feb or so - waiting for Vista and the DX10 cards to hit 2nd gen before I plunge in - and at least a bit of my willingness to wait comes from my desire to NOT reinstall Winxp on my current system.

no matter how often you run defrags, cleaning programs, anti-virus, anti-adware, anti-spyware or registry cleaning software, there are always stray exe and dll-files being loaded without your knowledge that slow down the system. also, updating programs to newer versions can sometimes lead to slowdowns (probably related to what i mentioned above). a reformat and clean install does wonders to any system. you might think your system is fast even though you haven't reformatted in 3 (or even 4) years, but it's not - at least not compared to how fast it could be.

naturally, there's more to it than just reformatting. you should never run more programs in the background than necessary. i have 4 items in my system tray that load after start up, and that's enough for me. if i need anything else i start it up when necessary. i also always try to choose software that isn't resource-intensive. anti-virus programs usually bog a system down pretty well. try to find one that is both effective and puts little strain on the system (there are very few out there and it's hard to find a good compromise between effectiveness and resourcefulness). NOD32 does a good job for me, but admittedly, it could be a bit less demanding resource-wize.

I'm in the same boat, locked in the upgrade waiting game.

I've got an old win2k machine with an AMD 2400, 1gb pc2700 memory, and a 6800gt (AGP). I've also not done a clean format/reinstall for years. [pause for laughter].

As tough as it is to just say 'screw it' and build a new rig now, I keep telling myself to wait for the Vista bugs to get worked out, and take advantage of technology that isn't available yet.

Hopefully by the time I pull the trigger and "upgrade" to a completely new system (about this time next year) to take advantage of Vista and DX10, I'll also be able to take advantage of technology like PCIe 2.0, multi-processor vid cards, smaller procs (maybe a true quadcore AMD chip), etc.

Guess I'll go format and reinstall good ol' Win2k now, lol ...

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Wow four year without a reinstall is no joke. That thing must be more messed up then Michael Jackson.

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I can remember when I thought this was normal for an operating system too.

Today my main desktop has not been rebuilt for since 2002. It started out life as an install of "Woody" when Woody was Debian's "testing" distribution and had the 2.2 Linux kernel. I upgraded the install to Sarge in mid 2003 when it was the "testing" release and ran Sarge until mid 2004. At that time I started using apt-pinning and ran a combination of Sarge, Etch, and Sid (Stable, testing, and unstable) until mid 2005 when I dist-upgraded to Etch and then about 2 months later upgraded to Sid and have been running it ever since.

That means I have upgraded, in place and without formatting the hard drive, the operating system 4 times in 4 years, and have gone through 3 major and many minor kernel revisions. The system is still stable, even though I was running what would be considered a combination of a previous Windows release, and a beta1 and beta2 of their next release at the same time for a few months, or either a full beta2 or beta1 release for more than 3 out of 4 years.

Anyone want to tell me about how stable XP is, and about the quality of the design of a Microsoft operating system? I haven't had to fight spyware or viruses, spend time running things like registry cleaners, and have never defragged the hard drive once in 4 years. This system is also a major part of a home lab and has had literally hundreds of different software packages installed and uninstalled during those 4+ years. I have used this system to learn how to run and administer a Linux box so it started out life being tortured by a Linux noob who made far more mistakes than correct decisions. It's also run a half dozen of my custom kernel builds, including the first one I ever attempted, besides the Debian kernel-image builds.

Anyone want to tell me just how much easier and less time consuming it is to administer a Windows box than a Linux box? Has anyone even tried doing with Windows what I've done with this Debian box? Anyone think it's even possible? I don't.

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Originally Posted by Gary K

I can remember when I thought this was normal for an operating system too.

Today my main desktop has not been rebuilt for since 2002. It started out life as an install of "Woody" when Woody was Debian's "testing" distribution and had the 2.2 Linux kernel. I upgraded the install to Sarge in mid 2003 when it was the "testing" release and ran Sarge until mid 2004. At that time I started using apt-pinning and ran a combination of Sarge, Etch, and Sid (Stable, testing, and unstable) until mid 2005 when I dist-upgraded to Etch and then about 2 months later upgraded to Sid and have been running it ever since.

That means I have upgraded, in place and without formatting the hard drive, the operating system 4 times in 4 years, and have gone through 3 major and many minor kernel revisions. The system is still stable, even though I was running what would be considered a combination of a previous Windows release, and a beta1 and beta2 of their next release at the same time for a few months, or either a full beta2 or beta1 release for more than 3 out of 4 years.

Anyone want to tell me about how stable XP is, and about the quality of the design of a Microsoft operating system? I haven't had to fight spyware or viruses, spend time running things like registry cleaners, and have never defragged the hard drive once in 4 years. This system is also a major part of a home lab and has had literally hundreds of different software packages installed and uninstalled during those 4+ years. I have used this system to learn how to run and administer a Linux box so it started out life being tortured by a Linux noob who made far more mistakes than correct decisions. It's also run a half dozen of my custom kernel builds, including the first one I ever attempted, besides the Debian kernel-image builds.

Anyone want to tell me just how much easier and less time consuming it is to administer a Windows box than a Linux box? Has anyone even tried doing with Windows what I've done with this Debian box? Anyone think it's even possible? I don't.

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For part of that reason i'm thinking of going to Mac OS X