Vista on a single core

[hemphill]

I have been scrapping together a pc for the sole purpose of recording midi/audio with a synth. I have on hand an old single-core p4 3.4 gig x64. As an educator, I have the option of obtaining Vista 32 for 32 bucks from my employer's bookstore. My question is, given enough ram, will Vista run worth a darn with my chip or will I be money and time ahead to invest in a Core 2 Duo or something. Remember, I will be using this system exclusively for midi and audio...cakewalk, basically.

Thanks for your imput

Horace

 

[o1die]

With 4 gigs of memory, vista should work fine with your old p4. If you don't need alot of features, any g31 board will work fine. Just get 2x2gb kit of ddr2 in pc6400 or pc8500, whichever is cheaper. I would also recommend the 64 bit vista if you can get it at a discount. Starting June 26th, Best Buy is rumored to be selling windows 7 upgrades starting at $49.99 for Oct delivery when it is released by Microsoft. I like windows 7 better than vista, especially the 64 bit version.

 

[hemphill]

Thanks a ton for your response!

Horace

 

[Bluescreendeath]

I actually have seen Vista running on a 2.2 GHz Celeron with 512mb of RAM. :O

It ran applications such as word processing and internet surfing just fine.

 

[mildiner86]

I made a PC for my dad, P4 2.8Ghz clocked to 3.2 4 gig ram and 8400GS

runs nice and nippy, hyperthreading should help

 

[loneninja]

I ran Vista on my old socket 754 Athlon 3400 clawhammer with 2Gb DDR 400 ram. It ran fine outside of the obvious limitations single core presents regardless of OS.

 

[hemphill]

Thank you all for your feedback

Horace

 

[medjohnson77]

I have a old 3800 x2 build with a biostar mother board 939 socket, 2 gb of ddr 400, and a 8400gs that I upgraded to vista 64 for my girlfriends parents. It does not handle vista 64 very well at all. I have had to dual boot with xp and switch it back to xp now. I would of thought that it would run it fine, but the onboard grafix on the biostar which is Nvida wouldn't even run vista 64, it just blanked out until I put in the 8400gs in. I am using Buffolo ram, and I have tried G.skill, and Kingston ram in the biostar board up to 4 gb of ram and it has had all kinds of problems. the first two ram slots it will not show the ram is installed. When I first set up the rig it did take the 4 gb of ram, now it will not show as it is installed and will not boot up with the 4 gb installed. I am not sure, but seems like the biostar board is junk, or going bad.... I got it with the 3800x2 for only $50 with the 2 gb of buffolo ram, so anyone have any thoughts on this, motherboard, Ram issue??

 

[o1die]

Your ram may be going bad, or just having problems mixing different brands. Buffalo isn't the best ram. I always use crucial, corsair, kingston, samsung, pny or pqi memory; all low latency.

 

[medjohnson77]

I had tried high performance G.skill, Kingston, was going to buy some Ocz but the biostar board is picky, it will not post with other ram. Also the 1st and 2nd slot on the motherboard for the ram will not post now. It did at first with 4 gb but now will not work at all. Only the third and forth slot will work. Bad motherboard maybe?