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Vista Installation Tips

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4ryan6   11-12-2008 at 02:25:00 AM

From all the recent problems that some seem to be encountering, heres some plain simple tips that should help with your Vista Installation.

 


Before you Install Vista 32 or 64 of any flavor.

 

Download the latest drivers for your hardware, burn them to disk and have them on hand, ready to install.

 

Make sure all your hardware is preferably Vista ready or that definite drivers are available for the specific hardware.

 

[Note, Some older hardware may not work with Vista, even though the manufacturer of the hardware provides a Vista driver.]

 

Do not pre overclock your machine, install with default settings, if your overclock is producing errors your installation will have errors, you can overclock later.

 

Test your hardware first and make sure your computer is solid and error free, HDD diagnostic, Memory diagnostic, to ensure your hardwares stability as best you can.

 

Be Patient during the Vista installation, at some stages it may seem the installation has stopped when it hasn't, if you think the installation has stopped look at your HDD LED activity light, if its flashing the installation is in progress.

 

Some memory modules require setting the timings and voltage manually, you need to know what your timings should be and compare them to what the BIOS sets on auto, if its not what it should be set them manually, or you could install Vista with errors.

 

If you want to use your SATA AHCI [Advanced Host Controller Interface] capability for your SATA HDDs, make sure its pre set in the BIOS as AHCI instead of IDE, so Vista will automatically install the drivers it needs.

 

Well thats all I can think of right now.

 

Oh! if in all your optical drives you may have installed a CDROM drive is in the lineup. take it out of the machine!

 

Anyone with additional tips, please list them.

 

Thanks everyone! Ryan


Message edited by 4ryan6 on 12-03-2008 at 04:42:04 PM
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badge   11-12-2008 at 06:14:02 AM
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Vista 64 takes considerabilly more hard drive space than Windows XP. Currently my personal Vista 64 installation with a moderate amount of software installed totals 54GB. Some of my other systems with Windows XP installation with basically the same software are 8 to 11 GB. Your HD's performance will begin to slow down when the drive reaches 50% capacity and beyond. So, in my case, My typical Vista installations require seven times the hard drive space as XP. I use a seperate hard drive for data storage. Something to keep in mind.

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4ryan6   11-12-2008 at 01:08:39 PM
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Thats a good point badge!

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4ryan6   11-14-2008 at 06:22:41 AM
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Overclocking is a great thing getting that extra performance for free, however theres more to overclocking than just your machine booting to a certain frequency, but not be stable and solid enough to sustain serious testing.

If you're installing drivers on an unstable machine, I don't care what operating system you're running you will have problems, there are so many new overclockers today that are barely squeaking inside the door of knowledge to know what the heck they're doing.

These same people boast high overclocks in one thread, and complain of jagged graphics in another, not even knowing the jagged graphics is called artifacting, and thats an unstable overclock.

Again I must say Do Not overclock your computer to install Vista, and also all your necessary hardware drivers, then overclock and stress test the overclock to assure its stability!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Narr   11-14-2008 at 03:34:45 PM
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Good tips on the install, I'm sure a lot of people will follow them. :)

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4ryan6   11-23-2008 at 12:40:28 PM
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Narr wrote :

Good tips on the install, I'm sure a lot of people will follow them. :)




Thanks

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4ryan6   12-01-2008 at 03:25:04 AM
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If you have either an Nvidia GPU or a Creative Soundcard with the drivers supplied by the manufacturers of the hardware updated and working fine, and you go to the Windows Update and find Microsoft has hardware drivers available for those products, I advise you not to download and install them.

If you do you'll find out why I wrote this warning, that hardware will run perfectly with the drivers provided from the prospective hardware manufacturers.

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4ryan6   12-04-2008 at 04:39:42 AM
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Bump

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