Due to my starting study next month, I'm going to buy a Laptop, basically as a mobile desktop replacement. As such, I've been looking at a Dell XPS 1710 (2 Ghz, 2 GB Ram, GF 7950GTX for 1850€ (cheapest find)). But since I'm not made of money, it'll probably be a Asus G1S (2GB Ram, 2,2 Ghz, GF 8600M GT, 15,4") for 1450€.

4 gig of Ram is pretty much the maximum you can get (without paying a fuckton, if at all), the rest of your stats are pretty decent.

If you simply want Vista to play one game or two, you may want to look at a virtual machine program (e.g. VMWare) that emulates a computer within your computer so you can use XP normally but boot up the second system within to play the game.

 

Office 2003 wouldn't install properly even with the orthodox elevation of user privilege mode. So much for Microsoft! Granted, it was a volume licence version from the university where she works, but geez.

 

Now, what you can do is simply have two Operating Systems.

Partition the HD up - one for daily work (the pretty Windows Vista) and gaming - TinyXP (you can download it through Bittorrent. Note that's illegal unless you have an existing install of XP ) OR, for more speed, Micro2003 (by far the fastest NT based OS. Ever. It's also illegal to download unless you have bought Windows Server 2003).

Of course, I can't force you to comply copyright laws.

This way, you don't have to worry about the strain your background programs will have on the gaming OS. It's like having a console in your PC.

 

Not true. The biggest problem, is your average idiot is running in Admin mode, when they shouldn't be. Fuck I KNOW better, and I'm doing it now myself, because alot of the stuff I use doesn't like to be run by a non-Admin no matter what I do to it. I get lazy, and almost never switch user accounts to the non-admin one.

As for Vista, just disable the damned UAC, which is stupid, and don't run in Admin mode.

 

Vista is the reason I don't use the laptop I got for my birthday. It's just something I let my friends use so they don't come over just to use the computer.