So, I finally decided I was going to go with Vista as the OS, and decided that I could get Ultimate. After installing the 64-bit version I had been using it for about a week when I found that there were problems with the sound card, which was a SB Live! 24-bit built into the motherboard. I grabbed an OEM X-Fi Audio gamer from Ebuyer.com for about £30 and installed it as soon as it was recieved.

After installing the card, I turned on the PC only to find that it was refusing to POST. Checking the “diagnostic LED’s” and the motherboard manual, I discovered it was having difficulties recognising the memory. “So”, I thought “I’ll chuck in the spare stuff to see what happens.” Unfortunately for me, the board was having none of it. So after pissing about with it I had to bite the bullet and admit it wasn’t going to work which meant I had two options. 1: Try and buy a new mobo for my (very old) 939 Athlon X2 4200+ or 2: get a new mobo/Processor/RAM set and use the problem as a an upgrade path. Naturally I chose the second option.

I have an old desktop from my workplace that runs Ubuntu as a spare machine, just in case there’s a major problem and I need it. I needed it. So, in it went and I fired up Ebuyer once again to look at what was on offer. Browsing the site I decided on: Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 (my first Intel!), 4GB of OCZ Platinum 800MHz DDR2 and an ASUS P5N32-E SLI Plus. Don’t bother checking the ASUS website for the board as I can’t find it anywhere, but it basically has a nForce 650i northbridge and a 570i southbridge meaning I get full 16x PCI-E SLI from the “budget” nVidia chipset. All in all, that little shopping trip set me back £307.

Having the spare PC meant I could get the stuff ordered before the delivery cut-off point and it came the next day. So I took my PC into work (advantage of being the IT guy – you can do it and no-body cares) and installed the bits as soon as they arrived. After spending the afternoon installing everything (I had a meeting in the morning, plus I had to wait for the delivery anyway) I had to reinstall Vista and the changed mobo meant the current install wouldn’t boot. By this time I had to wait until the following day to mess around with Vista as life was getting in the way.

After getting back into work, I tried installing Vista x64 again, but it refused to install, giving me a 0x0000007E error. Looking around the web, there appears to be many reasons for this, and I wasn’t able to determine what the actual issue was, although there is a hotfix from Microsoft that may be worth having a punt at later on. As my scanner, a Canon 3200F doesn’t have Vista x64 drivers, I decided to try Vista x86 (the 32-bit version for those that don’t know). The x86 sailed through the install, which is a bit annoying as I have 4GB of RAM. A 32-bit OS can only ever address 4GB in total (binary is a base 2 numerical system and 2 to the power of 32 is 4,294,967,296 or 4096MB/4GB) and needs to reserve up to a gig of this for IRQ’s etc, so any 32-bit OS will only see about 3 – 3.5 GB of physical RAM.

Anyway, I am now on Vista, with an improved system spec (I got 10,770 points in 3DMark06 at stock settings) and the Xbox finally connects to my machine without me having to do anything stupid like restart services. This of course could have all been avoided if I’d stuck with XP as I wouldn’t have bought the soundcard, which wouldn’t have meant taking the PC apart, which may have prevented the motherboard from dying (I don’t know about this, but its plausible) which would have meant not buying the new bits and being £350 out of pocket. So let this be a lesson to y’all, if you’re thinking out it, don’t do it.