bbarbulo

iTrader: (2)

i don't work there anymore, but if you don't feel like making the disks yourself, call up HP tech support and tell them you just got the computer and went to create the disks, and it says the disks have already been created and won't let you do it. and they'll send them to you free. good luck.

Slvr-Bullet

Ok, can someone explain this to me. Laptop suppose to have 1GB ram and 120GB HD.
But you can see that there's only 960 and roughly 111...wtf?!?

And does Vista really take up almost 7GB of space???

bbarbulo

iTrader: (2)

the seven gigs is your recovery partition (ie. a soft version of your recovery CDs)

the RAM, I think part of the RAM is allocated to the video processing power... ie. the mobo ram helps the video card ram process things like aero features of vista home premium.

if I were you, and are going to run vista long term, go to tigerdirect and pick up another gig of laptop ram. beware, most laptops only have 2 slots for ram and both will be filled with 512, so if you get one gig, you take one 512 out and put the gig in, you're gonna end up with 1.5 gigs of ram.

1 GB is real tight for vista premium. that's why both my laptop and desktop run 2 gigs.

xray

Vista sucks!!! The wife and I are having so many problems with it.

bbarbulo

iTrader: (2)

it's usually lack of user knowledge for the most part. what are you having problems with?

xray

^Lol. you nailed that one. Mostly the wife's work can't be done on Vista. Only formatted to work with Windows XP.

Slvr-Bullet

Ok, that makes some sense

The laptop can handle 4GB max and there's suppose to be 2x512 in there now. Would another gig really make a diff in performance??

btw, what's a good program removal app that gets rid of everything...and I mean everything. If I uninstall most of these "factory" programs, I don't want anything let on the HD.

bbarbulo

iTrader: (2)

xray, your wife's work really needs to get with the program LOL

ok getting rid of the HP preinstalled software is in general a huge pain in the ***. a lot of times when you remove stuff there are parts of it left behind and you get all these wierd pop-ups all the time saying stuff can't be found. in particular, you're gonna have difficulty removing vonage, vongo... and whatever that picture service on there is. the rest of the bloated crap on there is just generally links to websites. HP total care advisor can be disabled from running in the options menu of the total care advisor. don't use msconfig to disable stuff... that's just a diagnostic tool, and as soon as windows gets an update, it resets the boot configuration and the stuff you thought you disabled will come back.

now, I don't remember all the steps (there are a LOT) for removing vongo and vonage... do a search and do it that way. alternatively, you can delete the directories from the hard drive, but then you'll have to find a registry cleaning utility that's gonna fix all the registry entries related to the folders you delete...

IMO, to save yourself the headaches, just delete the desktop icons and put it out of your mind. it takes so little room that it's not even worth worrying about. if you wanna see what your computer will do without the burden of having all the extra crapware, just boot into safe mode and see how it runs.

and yes, 1.5 GBs of ram makes a big difference for vista. if you wanna see, vista has this thing that allows you to use a memory stick as additional removable ram... so as long as you have a memory stick that's fast enough, it'll allow you to see what kinda diff it makes.

Slvr-Bullet

Cool, thanks B. And here I thought you were just a car nut

xray

Yeah, I know. She can't work from home when she wants a day off . My brother is gonna convert it back to XP sometime soon. So, in your opinion, Vista is better than XP?

viper_2_4

hopefully MS fixed a lot of these issues with Vista next year with SP1

bananax

more ram for vista = good
it has a feature called pre-fetch, it learns what you do with your pc, what apps u load and use most often, and loads important files into the ram, this reduces load times by a huge amount, i'm talkin xx sec for photoshop cs3 down to 1-2sec

viper_2_4

that actually sounds like a pretty cool feature...

MS hasn't had the best memory managers in teh past, but that sounds like a (somewhat) useful addition...might have to see if I can find it on my Vista machine at home..

bananax

:P for the first week or so of use, vista won't be a big difference in speed vs xp, but once it learns its users habbits, it picks up, it indexs drives, super-fetch, and i think re-organizes the drive for the best access(sorta like 24/7 defrag i think(not sure on this one))

07Ex

Why don't you just get an Apple computer and then you don't have to worry about all this crap?

bananax

cuz they are the suck!
:P

bbarbulo

iTrader: (2)

i think apple computers are for women.

and yes Vista is better than XP

07Ex

I couldn't disagree more about both statements. I haven't seen too many women using Apple computers, and as for the XP vs. Vista goes, I think there are other people on this forum who can comment on that.

bbarbulo

iTrader: (2)

hmmm... how do you disagree on the first statement? do you know what I think better than I do? get out of my head professor Xavier. haha

as for the vista vs xp... get with the times man. main reason ppl don't like vista is cuz they don't know how to use it. anyone who doesn't like it simply hasn't given it a fair chance. vista kicks ***! XP is

OMG I love these smilies!!

viper_2_4

A lot of the "features" Vista added, OS X (in some flavor) has had for years...

but I don't want to start "that" discussion