cheapest way to buy windows vista

Zzebotes13 · Post by **Zzebotes13** » Fri May 18, 2007 8:01 pm

i've been thinking of building a laptop barebone, but i want to install vista on it withou spending $300 on the os. i've thought about buying the oem discks from newegg, and i've thought of just downloading the an iso, but i don;t know how they work really. does anyone have any ideas, or have a backup disc from a new laptop they have just purchased that they're willing to sell/give away. sorry for the long post.

ganonbanned · Post by **ganonbanned** » Fri May 18, 2007 8:03 pm

If you want to buy something, put it in the TP forum.

you can always use certain sites to...

Zzebotes13 · Post by **Zzebotes13** » Fri May 18, 2007 8:07 pm

i didn;t put it into the trading post because my priority is to buy it from an actual vendor, the fact that i suggested getting it from another benheck member was a sidenote

atari2600a · Post by **atari2600a** » Fri May 18, 2007 8:19 pm

Right now, Vista can be cracked so easily it's laughably funny. All you have to do is apply a patch to an image then burn it!

Twisted Warthog · Post by **Twisted Warthog** » Fri May 18, 2007 8:24 pm

Yeah my cousin hacked vista the week it came out.

Its not that hard to do at all if your a computer wizz that is.

Post by **bicostp** » Fri May 18, 2007 8:44 pm

Keep it legal, okay?

Don't bother with Vista yet; there's no point in getting it besides the shiny interface. XP will still do what you want it to, and you can buy programs that mimic Vista's shiny interface.

The cheapest way to buy Windows Vista is to buy it preinstalled on a computer.

Ecksem Diem · Post by **Ecksem Diem** » Fri May 18, 2007 8:52 pm

bicostp wrote:Don't bother with Vista yet; there's no point in getting it besides the shiny interface. XP will still do what you want it to, and you can buy programs that mimic Vista's shiny interface.

Buy? What's all this monetary nonsense? I've got my computer mimicking said shiny interface and I'm pretty sure I didn't do anything illegal to get it.

Edit: Wait, nevermind, I'm pretty sure WindowBlinds isn't free, so, yeah, I stole something to get it.

Harshboy · Post by **Harshboy** » Fri May 18, 2007 9:08 pm

There is a free way, it's called Vista Transformation Pack (VTP 6 for short)

Post by **Skyone** » Fri May 18, 2007 9:19 pm

bicostp wrote:Don't bother with Vista yet; there's no point in getting it besides the shiny interface. XP will still do what you want it to, and you can buy programs that mimic Vista's shiny interface.

If I'm reading correctly, he didn't ask "should I get Vista?", but "what is the best way to buy Vista?".

Anyways, I think the best way to get it is pre-installed on the system itself, like from Dell. But since you're getting a barebones, OEM is the other best way to go.

atari2600a · Post by **atari2600a** » Fri May 18, 2007 10:07 pm

Vista doesn't run well on 1GB, just FYI. I got my lappy back up to speed in comparison to my overlytweaked XP install, but it's still resource heavy. WoW runs at about 15FPS at some points.

Post by **Sparkfist** » Sat May 19, 2007 11:45 am

This is kind of a grey area so I'm just pointing you in the right direction. Look up the "FrankenVista" or "Vista Frankenstein". It's a mod that works using the beta version. And remember google in your friend.

Hso · Post by **Hso** » Mon May 21, 2007 6:12 am

from what i hear -- from lurking in the #Vista IRC channel, if you REALLY must install Vista on a machine with only 1GB of RAM, get a high-speed ReadyBoost compatible usb flash pen thingy, i hear it REALLY helps if you "suffer" from only 1GB of RAM :S

answering the main question though, buying a laptop with Vista included is by far the cheapest way.. i hear that when you get Vista installed on a laptop by a company, you only pay approx 50-60 dollars for it.. but you'll probably pay about 2-4x that if you buy the OEM :S

Post by **Sparkfist** » Mon May 21, 2007 8:02 am

Hso wrote:from what i hear -- from lurking in the #Vista IRC channel, if you REALLY must install Vista on a machine with only 1GB of RAM, get a high-speed ReadyBoost compatible usb flash pen thingy, i hear it REALLY helps if you "suffer" from only 1GB of RAM :S

Yeah I head about that on Thursday and really I don't think it's a great idea unless you have a lot of flash drives or can buy them cheap. Flash ram has on average 300,000 re-writes and to be honest if Vista's paging is anything like XP's you flash drive will be dead or have dead cells after a few weeks.

answering the main question though, buying a laptop with Vista included is by far the cheapest way.. i hear that when you get Vista installed on a laptop by a company, you only pay approx 50-60 dollars for it.. but you'll probably pay about 2-4x that if you buy the OEM :S

That might be true to a point. I bought my Acer for about $450 and that had Vista Home Basic installed. That version is about $100 for the OEM, so really not much saved there. I'd say if you wanted to check the price that they charge for Vista, go to Dell.com. Dell's now offering Ubuntu on their machines so compare the price they have for it to have Vista and Ubuntu installed. I have a feeling that you do save some money but it's not as much as Hso thinks.

Post by **bicostp** » Mon May 21, 2007 9:03 am

Hso wrote:from what i hear -- from lurking in the #Vista IRC channel, if you REALLY must install Vista on a machine with only 1GB of RAM, get a high-speed ReadyBoost compatible usb flash pen thingy, i hear it REALLY helps if you "suffer" from only 1GB of RAM :S

That's a bad idea. Like Sparkfist said, flash memory wears out after a couple hundred thousand read/write cycles. This sounds like a lot but remember the pagefile is always being read or altered. (Not to mention the USB bus causes a huge bottleneck in comparison to real memory.) If you want to do something like this, buy a cheap SATA hard drive (or another PATA drive and put it on the other IDE bus) and set up a large paging file on it. (You can easily do this from the System Properties window.) That's all "high-speed ReadyBoost UltraQuick technology Service Pack 2" does; it makes a paging file on a USB stick. It's not a good idea.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Mon May 21, 2007 10:15 am

Why not get something like i-ram? Almost the speed of regular ram, just set it as your virtual memory.