How do i back up Vista / speed it up ?

teulk

teulk

teulk

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Hi ive just bought this computer for my 12yr old son - i realise its by far not the best pc in the world but it was cheap and more than adaquate for my sons needs. (please no "you could have got this or that for your money")

Packard Bell iMedia 2218 - Desktop PC with 18.5" monitor
Intel® Celeron® E1400 Dual-Core
(2.00GHz, 512KB Cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Basic
1GB DDR2 memory
160GB SATA hard drive (7200rpm)
256MB NVIDIA® GeForce 7050 graphics
Dual Layer DVD Rewriter
6x USB ports (2x front, 4x rear)
10/100 network LAN port

It came with Vista pre installed, how do i create a back up disc should i need to reformat or re-install vista at any stage.

As for speeding it up whats the best tweaks to speed it up other than the obvious of adding more RAM. I also understand it "learns" the users usage and adapts and will speed those actions up so is it just a case of leaving to do what it does.
 
Macky said:
You coul... Jokes ;)

Seriously mate, XP would run SO much better on those specs.
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I thought that as his old machine with xp on it ran so much quicker and it only had half the RAM and a 1.6ghz processor. Could be time to stick xp on it then.
 
get more ram and stick with vista. that hardware is fine. i've been running vista on a single core celeron since xmas and it's fine. i do have 4gb of ram which vista obviously loves.
 
Mattus said:
Double the RAM and put the Windows 7 RC on it. Job's a good'un.
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How long will Windows 7 RC run for - may sound like a silly question but as its a pre-release version will it eventually have to be updated to the Full version to allow continued use ?
 
teulk said:
How long will Windows 7 RC run for - may sound like a silly question but as its a pre-release version will it eventually have to be updated to the Full version to allow continued use ?
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Good question... it's OK until the end of February next year. If you didn't want to go through the hassle of installing twice you could upgrade the RAM now, but keep Vista on it until 7 comes out in October.
 
Once all his applications and games are installed consider passwording the admin account to greatly reduce the chance of him accidentally installing badware.

As for disk imaging, something like Acronis can create an image you can restore from. Clonezilla is free and good but user-friendliness isn't it's strong point. If you give him a standard account and keep automatic updates turned on then you shouldn't have to re-image or re-install that often.
 
Mattus said:
Vista would be okay, but in my experience 7 runs significantly better on a machine of that kind of spec.
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Oh I agree 7 runs better than Vista on low-end hardware, but give Vista a decent amount of ram and it runs better on low end hardware than people give it credit for.

I think the problem is that generally when people see Vista running slow on low end hardware they think that it sucks on all low end hardware, when in reality it's just the lack of ram causing the slowness.
 
Yep, stick an extra gig of RAM in (could go all out and get 4gb in there, but I had Vista running for 2 years on 2gb of RAM in my rig perfectly happily), and use Acronis or Norton Ghost to take an image of his HDD now, before too much gets installed on there. Then if you have any problems you can easily just revert to that "clean" install.
 
DreXeL said:
Oh I agree 7 runs better than Vista on low-end hardware, but give Vista a decent amount of ram and it runs better on low end hardware than people give it credit for.

I think the problem is that generally when people see Vista running slow on low end hardware they think that it sucks on all low end hardware, when in reality it's just the lack of ram causing the slowness.
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Agree completely. A lot of the early negative feedback that Vista received came from people running it on prebuilt systems with 1GB RAM or less. Someone I know was sold a Vista laptop with 512MB RAM. Unsurprisingly it ran like a complete dog.
 
agree with the consencus, bung some more memory in. i always hate trying to run vista on anything with less than 2gb.
 
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