Hardware Upgrades- Vista and WHS

~ rbonini

I just upgraded my main PC from XP to Vista  Business. And stuck a new graphics card in.

Before we discuss the Windows Experience Index, the only down side of the upgrade is that there are no Vista drivers for the front ports ( USB, SD, etc)  or the built in sound card from Compaq. None. Their driver downloads page for the model ( SR1629 UK) essentially says “best of luck” for those upgrading to Vista.

In fact, I suspect that the model number of my PC is different to that on the page as the picture does not show the front card reader and the drivers don’t show up for it. Any Suggestions???

This is extremely inconvenient, as you might imagine.I’ve lost 3 USB ports and  a 9-in one card reader. The sound issue was fixed by buying a cheap SoundBlaster Creative card.

I bought a  Radeon HD 3650 PCI- Express card.  512MB of GDDR3 RAM (that has a 1.73GHZ clock). A 790Mhz engine clock. Crossfire X support as well as full HD. The graphics that come out of this thing are amazing.

I bought it mainly to play Flight Simulator X on it and it rocks ( though I’m still adjusting the settings to get the best combination of  graphics and speed/playability).

Here’s the System information page with the Windows Experience Index:

image

And here’s the breakdown:

image

I must say I was expecting a dramatic improvement, but not by THAT much. Can’t remember what the original score was before I put the card in, but it was pretty dramatic.

There is a pretty in-depth discussion of the Index on the Vista Team blog here.

Moving on.

My Windows Home Server has been screaming for the last week that the USB drive had failed ( its connected and turned on and has been tried on multiple USB ports on multiple PCs). I’m not sure precisely what happened but I’m a hard drive short and have 200Gbs of space left.

image

So I’ve ordered two Samsung SpinPoint F1 750GB SATA-II drives. One to replace the failed USB hard drive and the other to replace the aging 80Gb IDE drive. Since there is the hard drive replication feature, I’ve gone down the path of more drives rather than higher drive capacity.  This should take my total drive capacity to about 2 TB, which is plenty. I go through hard drive space rather fast, mainly cause I use SageTv to record Tv and virtual server to run the occasional VM ( I have a 44 GB VM, to give you an idea of size).

I got all this great hardware from a UK company called Overclockers UK. Great customer service. They have no problem dealing with returned items (I had to return a AGP card because my system was PCI-E). They are quite reasonably priced and have some really amazing specials quite often.

My hard drives were shipped 40 minutes after my confirmation arrived in my inbox. And that really is amazing service. If i need hard ware, they’re my first port of call. Well done guys!!

Published by rbonini

3 thoughts on “Hardware Upgrades- Vista and WHS”

  1. Hi there!, I have just recently got a new grahpics gard it’s a HD4870 1GB GDDRS I have inserted or placed it into my compeuter and I tried Playing Flight Simulator X on it and putting it on the highest quality but still has some hicups I pretty much have upgraded the whole compueter… and still no beter result can someone please tell me what should my compueter have to play it on a very high standerd…. It feels as thow I am just Gambeling with the whole thing so I just wanted to no if there are any othere advice on what to do to make this beter it would be very helpfull THANKS!!!

    Regards J.p.

    1. Jp. Make sure that you have the very latest ATI drivers fromthe website.

      Then make sure you have DirectX from Microsoft, the very latest version (10).

      It may be that you you need to configue boththe ATI settings in the ATI Control Panel and the Flight Sim Settings.

      There is not much more I can tell you without actually looking at the system.

Comments are closed.