OT quad core purchase

navydoc wrote on 6/7/2008, 8:53 AM

I'm considering purchasing this computer through Costco. It features quad core, 4 gb ram and dual 512mb 8800GT nvidia graphics cards.

Cyberpower PC

It also comes with Vista Home Premium 64bit. Since this will be my main computer, I have many programs that may not run on a 64bit system. My thought is to reformat the hard drive and install my XP Pro OS instead.

Does anyone think this would cause problems with the computer if I changed the OS?

Thanks for your response in advance.

edited to spell "quad" correctly 8^)

Doc

Comments

TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/7/2008, 9:08 AM

i'd recommend duel-booting instead of just whiping out 64. why? Vegas 64 comes out & it may be worth the headache of duel booting.

Harold Brown wrote on 6/7/2008, 10:24 AM

Unless you run into problems that you cannot solve forget about XP. As Happy says if you have to load XP do it as dual boot.

Jim H wrote on 6/7/2008, 11:32 PM

As far as I know there are no 64 specific hardware options out there, certainly not in something you buy as costco. so the answer should be that there's no problem reformatting and loading XP. One thing I see is that you're getting 4fig RAM. You won't get access to but 3gig or so in XP32.

Never did the dual boot thing but not sure if/how you would do it without creating another boot drive...would that not result in another reformat anyway? don't know.

navydoc wrote on 6/8/2008, 12:07 AM

Well, I wound up getting a different computer, the main difference being a 1 Terabyte hard drive (raid) and a single graphics card. So far, everything I've loaded under Vista 64 bit has installed and run just fine.

Hopefully my concerns about program/hardware compatability will continue to be unfounded.

Thanks for the replies

Doc

jabloomf1230 wrote on 6/8/2008, 7:41 PM

Why do you think that your programs will not run on a 64 bit system? I have been running Vista x64 since the beta program and Windows XP x64 before that and the only software that wouldn't run properly were very old programs that used a 16 bit (!!!) installer.

The main problem with the 64 bit OSes is that legacy hardware may not work properly. because of a lack of 64 bit drivers. Old printers, scanners, TV cards and sound cards are all possible casualties of a 64 bit upgrade.

But you have a new quad core machine with Vista x64 installed. The hardware should be okay and like others have said, you can always buy a 32 bit version of Windows XP and dual boot, until at least you are confident that all your software will work properly under Vista x64.