[Rayder]

My brother and I are setting up our first Vista PC. It will mainly be for recording HD stuff from TV and to compliment our 52 inch Samsung LCD HDTV. Might play the occasional game on it, but it won't be it's primary function.

Specs:
Asus P5Q-E motherboard
Asus 4670 video card
2gig RAM
Haupauge 2250 2-tuner HD TV card
PC desktop case with 7 inch touchscreen on it
Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66
2 1T Seagate drives for storage of recorded video
1 512gig Seagate to use as C:
Lite-on Blu-Ray combo drive
Vista Home Premium 32bit
680 watt PSU

I'm pretty used to setting up XP machines, but I never set up a multi-core CPU system or have ever set up a Vista machine before.

Is setting up Vista basically the same as setting up an XP machine as far as how the setup process works? Any differences I should know about specific to Vista? Will the multi-core CPU take care of itself through the OS or will we need to configure something? Should all the internal cards be in or out of the machine while setting up? Just need to know if there are any tidbits of specific info I should be privy to before we start the project this weekend.

[temeteus82]

The installation is easy. Similar to XP but more GUI

CPU will take care of itself so no worries. And OS will cfg itself. So in the end all you need to do is to install the newest drivers and set the SATA mode to AHCI mode and use Intel Matrix Storage Manager

[lepel]

Originally Posted by Rayder

Should all the internal cards be in or out of the machine while setting up?

All in. So you can start updating their drivers right away.

Good luck!

[Judas]

vista.... if it comes with SP1 intergrated is pretty damn easy.... my installation proceedures for vista is significantly cut down from what xp is.

pop everything in.... install vista... and then download and install the drivers (recommended reboot between each driver install if asked)

[Mac Daddy]

Yep same here just make sure it's all installed and go from there. I have found Vista very reliable at locating decent drivers by default.

Rayder haven't seen you in ages hope you and your Bro get this system rockin .. And Happy New Year

[Rayder]

Ah man! Apparently the PSU (BFG 680watt) is bad. Seems to be DOA. We're gonna have to RMA it to Newegg. sigh

That means about 2 weeks before we can continue.

But thanks to everyone for the tips. They will really come in handy.

[Rayder]

Ok, we finally have Vista setup and running, but we have run into some problems thus far:

1. The Windows help window seems to come up off screen and we can't see it. I've tried going to a higher resolution thinking maybe it got placed too far over to the right when we lowered desktop res....negative. I'd go to the taskbar and select "move" to try and bring into view. Didn't work. So even though it's mostly useless anyway (in my experience), we cannot access Windows help.

2. Adobe Flash player causes IE to become unresponsive, as if IE itself sort of locked.....but it's not 100% locked....hard to explain....it will bring up the very first webpage, but then anything else you click on will act like it's having trouble loading it. We can't click on any further links or buttons within IE and the only thing we can do is restart Windows. As soon as we uninstall Flash, then internet is fine.....minus Flash of course.

3. We couldn't turn on AHCI mode......I set the mode in BIOS, installed Vista and the next time I looked in BIOS it was back to IDE mode. If I try to change after install, Vista won't boot and just keeps restarting before it ever gets passes the little loading bar thing.

Now, we don't plan to overclock anything, so we have nearly everything in BIOS just set to AUTO. We're currently running Catalyst driver 8.12.

While we have 4gigs of RAM for the system, we currently only have 2gigs in it because we were told Vista 32 can't handle 4gigs. But we saw an option in BIOS to reallocate RAM for 4gigs. Should we try that?

At this point, we are at a dead-stop because of these issues.

Help?

[Tipstaff]

Originally Posted by Rayder

Ok, we finally have Vista setup and running, but we have run into some problems thus far:

1. The Windows help window seems to come up off screen and we can't see it. I've tried going to a higher resolution thinking maybe it got placed too far over to the right when we lowered desktop res....negative. I'd go to the taskbar and select "move" to try and bring into view. Didn't work. So even though it's mostly useless anyway (in my experience), we cannot access Windows help.

2. Adobe Flash player causes IE to become unresponsive, as if IE itself sort of locked.....but it's not 100% locked....hard to explain....it will bring up the very first webpage, but then anything else you click on will act like it's having trouble loading it. We can't click on any further links or buttons within IE and the only thing we can do is restart Windows. As soon as we uninstall Flash, then internet is fine.....minus Flash of course.

3. We couldn't turn on AHCI mode......I set the mode in BIOS, installed Vista and the next time I looked in BIOS it was back to IDE mode. If I try to change after install, Vista won't boot and just keeps restarting before it ever gets passes the little loading bar thing.

Now, we don't plan to overclock anything, so we have nearly everything in BIOS just set to AUTO. We're currently running Catalyst driver 8.12.

While we have 4gigs of RAM for the system, we currently only have 2gigs in it because we were told Vista 32 can't handle 4gigs. But we saw an option in BIOS to reallocate RAM for 4gigs. Should we try that?

At this point, we are at a dead-stop because of these issues.

Help?

Be sure to upgrade Vista to SP1 asap as there are a lot of fixes in there you are going to want.

3. This AHCI problem sounds either like a bios issue, or a saving issue. In the fist case you should upgrade the bios asap, and in the second case try saving your settings differently. Some mobos have more than one way to save options, such as saving while quiting the bios, separate save, or using the function keys to save, so give each a try to see if it the settings stick. As for activating it after Vista is installed, there is a way to do it, but it's risky as you may pooch the install. If you haven't gone very far with the install it's just better to start over again.

As for the last part, 32bit Vista sees 4GB (or at least reports it), but it doesn't use more than 3.5GBs. If you have a video card that has more than 512mb of ram on it then things become really interesting due to the way system ram is set aside. The option in the bios, I can't comment on that as I've never encountered it before. If in doubt read your manual as it should explain what it's for.

[Rayder]

Well, we got all our issues worked out. Flash wasn't working because of some security settings in IE. Windows help was working, but it was going to the secondary screen on the case which has the iMON stuff displayed and it was under that. I dragged it back to the primary screen. As for the 4gig thing, we just enabled the RAM allocation thingy in BIOS and it worked fine. We see about 3.25gigs of RAM available......good enough.

Now we get to start installing utilities and games and whatnot.

So, it's all good now.

[Mac Daddy]

Good stuff glad ya got it sorted

[Customgamer1]

I would like to add that you should most likely add more ram ASAP if you are going to be dealing with HD video.