Vista free upgrade and Guild Wars

My title is innacurate, it's mostly just vista i need help with. (Sorry, but i can't find hepl anywhere).

I bought my laptop in December, it was over £400 and claims it is vista capable, so therefore eligible for a free vista upgrade. So i go to the microsoft website and download the vista advisor, find out that my best choice is vista premium. Yay. So that's great, i'll just claim my copy. Oh, i can't find it. Great.

An hour and a half of fruitless searching later (bar a few gw guru detours) and i still haven't found anyhting about it.


Also, if i ever manage to upgrade to vista premium ( from media centre), what problems should i expect to get. It may seem like jumping to conclusions that i will have problems, but i always do ,and not for 1 second will i expect to run gw flawlessly after changing my os.

Thanks for any help!

Whenever one of my threads gets a response, i'll eat the closest thing. Someone help me goddamit =(

firstly, don't upgrade...

upgrades use parts of the original installation and even if thngs are similar, they don't always sync properly...

however, if you get a full version, do a Full install, but if its a fairly new laptop, you shouldn't have any issues

I do not think if your computer is "Vista Capable" that you are eligible to recieve a discounted upgrade to Vista. I have one that it labelled as "Vista Capable" and does not come with a discounted upgrade to Windows Vista.

Many stores gave away free Vista upgrades if you purchased a new pc within the last month before the Vista retail release.

From what I've read around here, there's not been too many problems between Vista and GW, but you may want to make sure your video card manufacturer has got the Vista-ready drivers available. Also, like Lonesamurai said, you would probably be better off doing a fresh install, rather than just upgrading.

You might want to contact the manufacturer for your machine and ask. What they should have done is sent you either a product key or a CD and product key. The product key is the important part - it determines what version you get. It's more than likely this will be Vista Home Premium as the upgrade advisor says.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/pro...e/capable.mspx


If you're talking about the free upgrade to windows vista you should check there. Make sure your computer manufacturer is one of the ones promoting it. Then make sure your model is included. Then proceed to register for your free copy. They will mail it to you free of charge. Also just because the upgrade adviser said premium was the best does not mean you're going to get that one. It all depends on what OS your PC came with. EG: Mine came with Windows Media Center so I will get an upgrade to Home premium. I hope this helped you a little bit.

Thanks, every post helped. I am running Media Centre, i have been to PC World an they said i should get the free upgrade to premium, but said that i should check the microsoft website. A

Also you get the free upgrade if you purchased a computer that is vista capable or premium ready, cost over a £400 ( don't know how many dollars) and was bought after 26 of october (or close to).

Just an FYI. Vista is a crazy resource hog of an OS. I wouldn't recommend using it until the kinks are taken out and XP is no longer supported (Microsoft says they will end XP support in 2011 I think).

Since when? I haven't had any more issue with it hogging resources than I did with Pre SP2 XP... In fact my system runs quicker and far smoother under Vista than it did with XP SP2

I've had fabulous luck with Vista, too - but it could very well be hardware. I've got a 64-bit machine and Vista kicks the crud out of XP in terms of x64. The 5 Vista machines at work and the other 2 in my house are also working great.

Specifically, here's where you can go for some manufacturers:
Dell: https://www.dellvistaupgrade.com/default.aspx
Lenovo: http://www.pc.ibm.com/us/microsoft/vista/upgrade.html
Toshiba: http://www.toshibadirect.com/td/b2c/...ExpressUpgrade
Sony: http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/sup...=1&info_id=137

If yours is not one of those, let me know and I'll get you the link. The free upgrades come from the OEM, not from Microsoft directly. Imagine if all the OEMs handed MS the information for all their customers and what they purchased so that MS could hand out upgrades - people would crap bricks! Not to mention the organizational nightmare that would be. So, these are distributed through the OEM (indicated by the fact that some of those sites will ask for your serial number).

Also, if they offered you a free "upgrade", they might mean upgrade edition which means you can't install clean. But there's ways around that.

Are you running more then 2gb of RAM? And are you basing your speed/smoothness on how it "feels" or on bench marks. Vista uses more system resources this is fact. Depending on your Vid card type Vista may run games poorly, though this is argueably not Microsofts fault.

xp64 was a joke...Microsoft should be ashamed of itself for selling that

yea do a google search but the gist is you install the upgrade without a key as a 'trial' then load Vista a second time...

Personal benchmarks on PCMark06

I've gotten a 5% increase and my system is...

Motherboard: MSI AM2 K9N NEO-F, NF550, S AM2, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533/667/800/400, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX
Processor: AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ (2 CPUs), ~2.0GHz
Memory: 1024MB RAM
Hard Drive: 400 GB Total (2 x 200 Gb)
Video Card: 256MB Palit 7600GT Sonic, PCI-E(x16), Mem 1500MHz, GPU 575MHz, 12Pipes, D-Sub/Dual Link DVI/HDTV SLI
Sound Card: Realtek HD Audio output
Operating System: Windows Vista™ Ultimate (6.0, Build 6000)

The ONLY issue I've found so far (since the update on Sunday 4th Feb) is that its constantly using 70% of my RAM, but that won't be an issue from Thursday when my second Gig RAM arrives

Yep MS doesn't write drivers, and even had a number of people from a number of driver manufacturers working on drivers in parallel with Vista. It varied as to who got their drivers in order faster.

Do you literally mean XP 64-bit, or Windows 2003 64-bit Professional? Heh, and the fact that I have to ask that question implies that the situation is poo. I was okay with the Windows 2003 Pro version, but I didn't move to 64-bit computing in my home until Vista was close (purposely).

Lonesamurai, here's a question: were you running x86 Windows XP on that box previously, or one of the x64 flavors?

Mine was running killer under the 1gig - I really only added the second one because my hubby needed a second one for recording purposes (home studio), and I hate being outdone. My machine has used nothing but Vista since I got it 4 months ago, so I don't have a baseline to compare to in that specific machine's case though.

I switch, and yesterday I finsihed installing Vista again for Benchmarking (and I'm fully expecting more of an increase as the drivers start to rear thier ugly heads) I have the full retial version of Microsoft Windows XP SP1 OEM and the full Vista OEM

I was running the 64bit Vista beta 2 and RC1 before then though, however, i ran these on my old machine and had no issues, my old machine being:

Motherboard: Socket A piece of crap from MSI
Processor: AMD Sempron 2400+ Socket A
Memory: 1024MB RAM
Hard Drive: 80 GB Total (2 x 40 Gb)
Video Card: 256MB Nvidia Gefore 5200 PCI (no AGP or PCI-E)
Sound Card: Realtek HD Audio output

And apart from Areo on RC1, it ran beautifully back then aswell... So to be honest thats the lowest system spec I'd put vista on, and even then I wouldn't put Ultimate on (I actually don't see the point in Ultimate as Home Premium has everything that XP Pro had)

EDIT~ I am now using my old system as a media center using Vista RC1 and will do until June when it expires and at that point I will stump up for a 360 and add a 200Gb external HDD to it and plug it into my surround sound system to be my main media center... but my old rig plays music and videos without worry from copy protection and DRM in anyway shape or form

Ultimate's got a few shiny bits that are cool to have but hardly necessary. In my case, I use it just because I can (heh), although I'd be stuck with Business edition on my laptop (I need domain joining capability on the laptop).

I've altered my GW shortcut to turn off Aero when I start the game, just because I'm not looking at Windows anyway then, may as well free up some stuff. :P

We've got one of our old machines running Home Premium as a media center for a bit, too. It's probably pretty close to the bottom, but it's got Aero and it looks sweet (whoo I can watch TV in the bedroom!). My old computer, previous to the x64 beast, didn't even run Aero (Ti 4600 video card FTL), but I played most of the Factions preview event on it with Vista just for kicks.