Resistance, apparently, is futile. Vista Questions

I am soon to be the owner of a new laptop. Against my wishes, I will be forced to accept Vista as my default OS, as the OEM will not follow business rule #1: "The customer is always right". Hopefully XP drivers exist for the laptop devices, I know I can still score an XP Pro license. Anywho, two questions.

What SKU of Vista do I need? I will be on a local LAN, and I know XP Home was useless is these situations. My choices are 32 or 64-bit Home Premium, 32-bit Business, and 64-bit Ultimate. The processor is a Turion X2 Ultra so I would imagine I want a 64-bit OS.

More importantly, the video card will be an ATI HD3450. Anyone know if this card with Vista runs MTW?

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Originally Posted by drone

I am soon to be the owner of a new laptop. Against my wishes, I will be forced to accept Vista as my default OS, as the OEM will not follow business rule #1: "The customer is always right". Hopefully XP drivers exist for the laptop devices, I know I can still score an XP Pro license. Anywho, two questions.

What SKU of Vista do I need? I will be on a local LAN, and I know XP Home was useless is these situations. My choices are 32 or 64-bit Home Premium, 32-bit Business, and 64-bit Ultimate. The processor is a Turion X2 Ultra so I would imagine I want a 64-bit OS.

More importantly, the video card will be an ATI HD3450. Anyone know if this card with Vista runs MTW?

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Enjoy playing for about fifty years and then NEVER finishing the campaign. Also, enjoy clicking the auto resolve button every time and losing in a 8 v 1 stack battle because you can't play 3d games. :beam:

Actually, it might be slightly better than that, but Vista hates MTW and the card will probably let you play the first Half-Life. I hope you like Counterstrike.

If all you want is to connect to a network and use printers etc, get home premium, if you want more, I'm the wrong person to answer as I didn't notice any difference between my 32bit home premium and my 64bit business version concerning network stuff, they can both connect and be used for basic networking, beyond that I have no needs.
Ultimate and Home Premium also include DVD codecs so I'd not go with 32bit business anyway.

Never tried running MTW on vista and have nvidia cards anyway so I'm afraid I can't help you with that.

I have Vista and an ATI HD2600. Runs MTW like an absolute charm, I've not had an ounce of trouble.

In terms of performance, your videocard is somewhat similar to the Geforce Go 6600 or the Nvidia 9300M G. It should run MTW well provided there aren't some horrible Vista problem. New games, however, would be low of the fps even at really low resolutions/settings

I had no trouble playing MTW on a Vista machine

Found another laptop with Home Premium 64, a Core2Duo, and an ATI HD3650 for a comparable price. I hadn't really looked at the specs on the HD3450, I had no idea it was so bad (the 64bit memory bus kills it). Anyone have experience dealing with Lenovo?

Good to know that MTW runs on Vista, I've got some other older games that I hope play as well. With the uncertain reliability that nVidia cards face, I'm surprised that so few vendors are offering ATI graphics in their laptops. Since it's a laptop, I don't expect to run Crysis on it.

Well, crysis actually runs fine on laptops with like a Nvidia 8800M GT/9700M GT/9800M GT. Those laptops, though, tend to be pretty costly at least

The ATI 3650 is equivalent to the Nvidia 7800M GTX except it is compatible with DirectX 10 (I think) so its half decent for what you can get on a laptop and it is only 1 generation older than the 8800M GTX which is still a beast for any computer right now

Anyways, what is your price range? Asus happens to have some excellent deals with their laptops and they currently have a crazy awesome free warranty on all laptops:

2 Year Normal Warranty (Free overnight shipping to and from their repair centers)
1 Year Accidental Damage Warranty (:2thumbsup::2thumbsup::2thumbsup:)

All of this is international too so it doesn't matter where you are

Hello drone,

Some brands and depending on type, supply a XP recovery CD. It's not always obvious which one does, so it helps to ask the sales and insist it's important to you.

I purchased a notebook lately, it's for work. Vista is installed on it by default, but it has XP recovery CD's. Note: it has XP recovery CD's, not Vista ones. A customer can create those himself using the recovery partition on the HD.

I already had a little experience with Vista and I wasn't delighted. By choosing a notebook I already was pretty sure that I wanted XP, but I gave Vista a try. It's a test of patience and failing to run software and I installed XP now.

I would advice to go for 32 bit XP Pro, it's not a MI since many people don't want Vista. I believe vendors are (somewhat) forced to install Vista and recommend it (publically). But they also know what customers want.

Some OEMs still offer XP Pro, but only in their business lines. I haven't really found one with the options I want here. Some have ATI FireGL cards, I have no idea how these compare to gamer cards and how well they are supported. For me, XP Pro would be the ideal OS, before I buy I will definitely be looking at XP drivers for whatever notebook I get.

My price range is under $2000. Most vendors seem to be in love with nVidia graphics cards, but those are no-gos for me due to MTW issues and the rumored fab problems with the nVidia chips. I would love a laptop with ATI Mobility 38-- or 48-- cards, but I haven't found any yet.

If you don't mind a 17 incher, the Alienware M17 is the way to go (for ATI cards at least). With $2050 you can get

17-Inch WideUXGA 1920 x 1200 LCD (1200p) with Clearview Technology
Intel® Core™2 P8400 2.26GHz (3MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
Dual 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 3870 - CrossFireX™ Enabled! :smile:
4GB Dual Channel DDR3 SO-DIMM at 1066MHz – 2 x 2048MB
160GB 7,200RPM (8MB Cache) w/ Free Fall Protection

It starts at $1399 so there could be alot of customization that would still fall under your price range.

I think this laptop is perhaps the only one out there with the ATI 3870 series. Don't expect any laptops with the ATI 4000 Mobility series out for at least a few months since those cards were only shipped to laptop manufactures like last week

A 17" screen is exactly what I'm looking for.

DellAlienware, eh? Joy. Overpriced compared to others I've seen, but a lot of options I like.

Well, I would normally agree that Alienwares are usually extremely extremely pricy ($350 for 4 Gigs RAM? Come on!) but the M17 is actually priced surprisingly competetively especially considering how you can throw on dual 3870s in it without even going over $2000