upgrade from XP to Vista?

[twicksisted]

Hey Guys,

I want to move over to vista, but I have had my rig running for the last 3 months and have loads of movies, photos etc installed.

I see that I can buy a Vista upgrade package at a game store and was wondering if its worthwhile. I know that ages ago doing an upgrade from 98 to 2000 was a bit crap and slow in the end, but im not sure if this is still the case.

Should I hold out and get vista ultimate 64bit... or should I go out tomorrow and get the vista premium 32bit upgrade?

what are ther cons of using the upgrade package, can i only use it once etc...?

[AphexDreamer]

I would wait for the Vista Ultimate 64bit and do a Fresh Install, I personaly never do upgrades.

[twicksisted]

yeah i thought as much... the thing is if i do an upgrade, I get to keep all my applications etc in place (or so i seem to think)
Also, i could do a fresh install of xp at a later stage and then apply the upgrade again (or so i assume)

[erocker]

I think your PC is perfect for 64-bit Vista. I'm not sure what your HDD setup is, but I generally like to keep my O/S on a separate drive so I can do fresh installs.

[AphexDreamer]

Originally Posted by twicksisted

yeah i thought as much... the thing is if i do an upgrade, I get to keep all my applications etc in place (or so i seem to think)
Also, i could do a fresh install of xp at a later stage and then apply the upgrade again (or so i assume)

Yes ture you get to keep your old files and such, but if you have noticed there is a Vista version and an XP verion for most programs/application and that is because they are designed to work better for that certain OS.

If you were to do an upgrade you might get some instability and programe compatibility errors in the future(I know from experinece), so I would back up all your importen files and such, do a clean install and get the right OS version for all your Programs.

Plus vista installs way faster on a fresh install then on an upgrade, and the Format takes but seconds to do, thats something I really like about the Vista Setup Install.

I remeber waiting hours to format XP and then another bunch of hours to install it, they really worked on that with Vista. A++

[ShadowFold]

I had XP Sp3 and bought a OEM copy of VistaBasic and just set it on dual boot cause... you know, its vista lol

[twicksisted]

yeah i guess.... just i got a voucher for GAME store and theres nothing i want there.... the only thing i want is Vista Ultimate 64bit....
so being hasty and wanting to use it now (lol) i thought i may try the upgrade to vista... then i can get my GFX to run DX10 (and probably be seriously dissapointed lolol )

Im running four WD320gig RE16 harddrives in raid 0 ( 1.16TB )
I also had two raptor 74gig in raid 0 but put those into my GF's machine as they were miles slower than the one i got now.

So I cant break the raid and still have my data... and to do so, ill need at least a 500gig drive to dump it all onto before i move over to vista.

[twicksisted]

Originally Posted by ShadowFold

I had XP Sp3 and bought a OEM copy of VistaBasic and just set it on dual boot cause... you know, its vista lol

cant do that as i have no partition on my raid drive (well except for the minimum 8mb partition by default)

[ShadowFold]

btw you wont be disapointed by DX10, screen shots dont do it justice

[AphexDreamer]

Originally Posted by twicksisted

yeah i guess.... just i got a voucher for GAME store and theres nothing i want there.... the only thing i want is Vista Ultimate 64bit....
so being hasty and wanting to use it now (lol) i thought i may try the upgrade to vista... then i can get my GFX to run DX10 (and probably be seriously dissapointed lolol )

Im running four WD320gig RE16 harddrives in raid 0 ( 1.16TB )
I also had two raptor 74gig in raid 0 but put those into my GF's machine as they were miles slower than the one i got now.

So I cant break the raid and still have my data... and to do so, ill need at least a 500gig drive to dump it all onto before i move over to vista.

hmmm, thats going to be hard for you to back up your files, that is if you have a lot of files to back up.

I'm thinking about going RAID 0 as well, I hear its better then having one large HD, don't you have 4 times the chance of something going wrong though???

[ShadowFold]

Originally Posted by AphexDreamer

hmmm, thats going to be hard for you to back up your files, that is if you have a lot of files to back up.

I'm thinking about going RAID 0 as well, I hear its better then having one large HD, don't you have 4 times the chance of something going wrong though???

No but if one drive goes corrupt then they all do yay

[twicksisted]

Originally Posted by AphexDreamer

don't you have 4 times the chance of something going wrong though???

Well yeah i guess... everytime i get a crash (BSOD), I have to run chkdsk to fix my raid which is a pain... but it does fix itself.

Also in order for chkdsk to work i need to load the raid drivers from a floppy drive and I dont have one in my pc, so i have to get an old one out of an old pc, then make a driver disk with my GF's pc... lol...

So all in all its not good for OC'ing

But i think these drives will last for a while yet... never had any issues using Western Digital Drives... and these are the RE16 (raid edition) enterprise drives... brand spanking new

Still sh1t happens... though data isnt everything and sometimes its good to have a fresh start, even if youre forced into it

[twicksisted]

Originally Posted by ShadowFold

No but if one drive goes corrupt then they all do yay

This is why im thinking of putting all my old spare parts together to build a windows home server pc, to do automatic backups of my rig... this way if it falls over, then I have a copy of all the porn, i mean data :P

[AphexDreamer]

Originally Posted by twicksisted

Well yeah i guess... everytime i get a crash (BSOD), I have to run chkdsk to fix my raid which is a pain... but it does fix itself.

Also in order for chkdsk to work i need to load the raid drivers from a floppy drive and I dont have one in my pc, so i have to get an old one out of an old pc, then make a driver disk with my GF's pc... lol...

So all in all its not good for OC'ing

But i think these drives will last for a while yet... never had any issues using Western Digital Drives... and these are the RE16 (raid edition) enterprise drives... brand spanking new

Still sh1t happens... though data isnt everything and sometimes its good to have a fresh start, even if youre forced into it

Hmmm, thanks for that.

I do overclock a lot and when trying to find a stable Overclock I get BSOD(as we all know), so do you have to run Chdisk everytime with any RAID 0 configuration like 2 HD's or just with 4 or more???

Sorry for being off topic lol.

[twicksisted]

Originally Posted by AphexDreamer

Hmmm, thanks for that.

I do overclock a lot and when trying to find a stable Overclock I get BSOD(as we all know), so do you have to run Chdisk everytime with any RAID 0 configuration like 2 HD's or just with 4 or more???

Sorry for being off topic lol.

Well, not every crash, but if you push your cpu overclock too hard and it hangs or BSOD's on startup, chances are you going to need to run CHKDSK... like 4 out of 5 BSOD's it corrupts itself enough to not be able to boot.

Either way, even if it does run after a BSOD... just a crash on its own without shutting down properly, you will want to run chkdsk just incase... sometimes disk defrag will not run after a crash saying that it needs to be checked.

Also, to be honest, I notice no real difference in my raid as to a normal single drive configuration. Only difference being in benchmarks where these 4 drives fly (apparently) walking all over my raptors and other server raid setups (according to sisoft sandra).

Realistically, its not worth it though as you arent going to feel the milliseconds these drives shave off a single drive configuration