What Issues are there in Running GBPVR in Vista-64 and Windows7-64?

[LewE]

Here's a perfect solution:

1. Consider building your own machine.
   
2. Do NOT buy an OS.
   
3. Download Windows 7 Release Candidate (32 or 64 bit) for FREE here
   
4. After July 1 2010 you will finally need to buy Windows 7 or an alternative as the RC will stop working.
   

Self-building a machine is truly simple and you will get a LOT more machine for your dollar. Today there are tons of online resources showing you how to do it.

Good luck and have fun deciding on a new system!

Well, after going through my paper exercise of costing out what I would put into my PC and comparing that to what I could get from Dell (Gateway and HP don't seem to offer custom builds) I decided that Dell came short in some important areas for me (even taking in to consideration the extra 6% discount I get from AAA on all Dell purchases) and that by building it myself I could get what I want (at least in phases) and come close to my budget.

I went ahead and ordered the parts this morning. I used three different internet stores (Circuit City for the case and cooling fans), MWave (for the Motherboard, processor, and RAM plus a keyboard), and NewEgg for the rest (power supply, Hard drive, DVD/CD Drive, video card, monitor and mouse). I will use Win7-64 RC until it is released (deferring that cost) and initially use my current USB drives for the data drives (deferring the purchase of a 1TB drive for that) and put off buying some RAM (I will initially get 4GB and later add another 4GB).

The two toughest decisions were the power supply and the video card. Looking at Dell PCs with multi-core processors I saw they had 400W power supplies. When I started looking at the power supplies, especially the customer comments on the NewEgg site, I kept getting bad feelings about them until I ended up choosing a 700W supply. I expect that it will be more power than I need but it seemed to be the first (in increasing cost) where the comments were not disconcerting.

The choice of video card was difficult because, while I am not building a gaming machine, most of the customer comments seemed to be from gamers who are looking for high performance cards. I ended up choosing one where there weren't a bunch of comments from customers about incompatibility or overheating.

I'm pretty happy with what I ended up with and am positive that I wouldn't have anything like it buying from Dell or some other prepackaged system.

Now, I have to be patient wait a couple days for the boxes to start arriving.

Thanks for giving me the push to consider something that wasn't even a remote thought originally.

[DataCabbitKSW]

Fbachofner:
While the WIndows 7 RC will work until June 1, 2010 there is also the issue of March 1, 2010. Starting in March next year, it will reboot every 2 hours. In June it will cease to function entirely. However, the final version will hit stores on October 22nd of this year. So this gives four, almost five, months to switch between the RC and the final version.
The second thing to note is that there is no official upgrade path between Windows 7 RC (or betas) and the final version. You will need to do a full reinstall. Also just in case anybody didn't have it:
Windows 7 RC download from Microsoft: http://tinyurl.com/9agzvs

[Lindsay]

Sounds like a great system build. I have just bitten the bullet by dual booting to Win 7 x64 and all seems well so far as I can tell! I am full-time on the 64bit partition now. At least I know what to install for the final Win 7 release!

Good luck.

[LewE]

Fbachofner:
While the WIndows 7 RC will work until June 1, 2010 there is also the issue of March 1, 2010. Starting in March next year, it will reboot every 2 hours. In June it will cease to function entirely. However, the final version will hit stores on October 22nd of this year. So this gives four, almost five, months to switch between the RC and the final version.

I plan to use the time between now and October or so as a test period, slowly migrating applications to the new machine. If things go well, I will start to use it as my primary machine before Win7 is officially available.

The second thing to note is that there is no official upgrade path between Windows 7 RC (or betas) and the final version. You will need to do a full reinstall.

I plan on doing that. After several months of experimenting, I will then be in a better position to know exactly how I want to set up the computer. It will be nice to have a system set up cleanly.

In fact, I would have done a clean install on my current machine of GBPVR a while ago except that I haven't wanted to start from scratch to get to the same point I am now.

[LewE]

Sounds like a great system build. I have just bitten the bullet by dual booting to Win 7 x64 and all seems well so far as I can tell! I am full-time on the 64bit partition now. At least I know what to install for the final Win 7 release!

Good luck.

Between now and Win7 official release, I plan to use the time to learn about its features. I currently have XP Home on my 2.8GHz with 1.25GB RAM computer and have it set up with none of the animations or the new interface. I use the "classic" interface to get the best performance and because I never wanted to bother learning about the cutesy things Microsoft pawns off as improvements.

I ordered eveything on Monday and most of the stuff arrived Tuesday (one of the benefits of living only 75 miles or so from NewEgg and MWave) unfortunately, the last two parts (the case and cooling fans for it) don't arrive until Friday and next Monday.

Get this. Both the case and cooling fan were ordered from Circuit City on one order. CC shipped them in two separate shipments with the same type of shipping (Ground). They were both scanned as being put on the truck at the exact same time. UPS shows the case to arrive on Friday and the fans to arrive on Monday. UNBELIEVABLE. Until then I get to read whatever documentation came with the parts.

Here's my configuration:

Motherboard: IntelBOXDP45SG (http://www.mwave.com/mwave/skusearch_v3....ia=BA25072) with 4GBRAM

Processor: Intel Q8400 Quad (http://www.mwave.com/mwave/skusearch_v3....ia=BA26104)

Disk: Hitachi 500GB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6822145215)

CD/DVD: Sony Optiarc (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6827118033)

Video Card: EVGA (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6814130313)

Case: Ultra X-Blaster (http://www.circuitcity.com/applications/...u=ULT33178)

Power Supply: OCG 700W (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...6817341019)

I'll be partitioning the disk into a 300GB, 100GB, and 100GB partition. Initially the two smaller partitions will be used as logical drives for testing. Eventually, when I install the final version of WIN7, I plan to use the first 100GB partition to move some directories off of c: to try to keep their fragmenting down a little and make it easier to defragment them. The second partition will be used initially to store a copy of C: during final Win7 installation and then will be set up as another future boot partition. By then, I will either attach my current 250GB USB drive I currently use for data files and 500GB USB drive I use for GBPVR recordings or buy new internal drive(s) to replace them and use the USB drives as backup devices.

The nice thing about planning on several months of testing/playing/learning is that when I'm ready I can set up things right (for me) and not have to live with early bad decisions. That's one of the reasons I want to have a partition available for dual booting for later experimenting. I wanted to install the Win7 RC on my current machine but I couldn't clear up enough memory on my 80GB C: drive to create a big enough partition for trying Win7.