new computer set up

[trinto]

i promised to go shopping with my neighbour to buy a home computer, but before we could make arrangements, feeling bored one saturday afternoon, she took herself to currys and bought a thing.
its an emachine 64x2 dual core processor, running on vista, (pre-installed). this will be a machine that she would use for word processing, emailing and playing the odd dvd. however i am capable of setting up a computer and have noticed on system that it has less than 1 gb memory, think its 896mb, but havent got computer in front of me ... its 8 something. my understanding is that vista needs at least 1 gb, and is better with 2 gb memory, it has no office on it and we need to load some other stuff as well, do you envisage problems, i would like to address them before she goes live on internet in the next couple of days, sky say they will connect her within the next couple of days. thanks for reading this.

 

[ToxixMess]

1Gb should be a-ok from a view of just using the internet and word prcessing emailing and wacthign the odd DVD.

Personally, I always Shudder at the thought or sight of Vista.. its horrid and seriously bug ridden... why do you think MS are gogin to release Windows 7 late next year already..

WIN XP PRO Rox

 

[Spark123]

Sounds like it may have shared graphics. 1gb is about the minimum you need to run vista basic. iirc there is a facility to plug a USB memory stick in to boost performance however I don't envisage that being as good as proper memory.

 

[dave.m]

It looks like she has an eMachine with 1GB (1024MB) of RAM memory and the video card, probably an Nvidia GeForces, is integrated on the motherboard and is allocated 128MB of the RAM. Thus the machine has access to 896MB.
Microsoft say 1GB of Ram is enough for Vista Home Premium and Business but I would take that statement with a very big pinch of salt. It will run Vista but you may fall asleep waiting for it to do anything fast.
You didn’t say which model she had bought, but if it has 1GB memory then there will be room for a second DDR2 card.

Spark123 mentioned about using a USB Flash Stick as extra RAM, it is called ReadyBoost and Vista will do it. See the details in this link:

http://tinyurl.com/257gf3
Not the ideal way to work all the time, it would do at a push for some extra RAM but it is not as fast as a memory card.

I don’t think any computers for the home ship with a full Office Suite installed, possibly a 60 day trial like mine had, but you then have to buy the key to keep using it.
Much better to start with Open Office, a totally free Office download from:
http://why.openoffice.org/index.html

 

[SeanT]

1GB ram works fine with Vista Home Premium (32 bit!), I had this in my personal laptop for a little while before I forked out for an upgrade to 2 gig. Readyboost doesn't make a lot of difference, if you read the technical articles it's primary function is to make programs open faster. The best thing to make vista faster is as fast a hard disc as possible, as unlike XP pro it's impossible to have it usable with the paging file switched off unless you are running 64 bit (and can therefore address more than 3.2GB of RAM)

 

[Deluks]

Best thing to do with a new machine is to zap all the crapware that usually gets installed on preconfigured systems. Look in the system tray and disable/uninstall anything not needed, including Norton!