With respect to the question of issues relating to running Vista on older machines.
I bought my copy of Vista to work on a machine that I was still building at the time. all the components were less than six months old and were touted as Vista compatible. I'd made sure of this before building the rig. I do take Buckleysmoms point though. But in my case it definitely wasn't the case as all the components had been built since Vista was released.
Regards
Stephen
p.s. HOSS
I'll sort it out soon. From the web site I presume you’re a Radio Ham enthusiast? My uncle who lived in Australia was a dedicated fan. I remember him sending me a picture of his radio mast, which was huge. I went into the Royal Signals when I joined the army because of his influence, but trained for land based telecommunications rather than radio (unfortunately they were short of terminal equipment technicians {a glorified telephone engineer} at the time so the choice of radio relay technician, which is what I really wanted to train for was off limits at the time. I seem to remember there were 15 of us wanting to go for the Radio Relay training, but there were only 2 places available, so most of us were dumped into the terminal equipment training course. We had no choice other than picking from a hat to see who got the choice of Radio Relay. I lost. :(
p.p.s.
Also with respect to 90% of Vista's problems being able to be fixed; I don't think so. When I installed my Home Premium, I tried everything I could think of, including upgrading my hardware. (I bought a new motherboard that said it was Vista compatible and a new DVD writer because my older one wouldn't show up in ‘my computer’. Neither purchase helped. I tried flashing the bios, no joy. There were innumerable other problems that I tried to fix. I even searched the forums relating to Vista problems with no luck; but when it came to the end of the 28 day period where you have to register the product, I couldn't even do that despite having a genuine serial number, so it was removed (gladly and sadly) from my computer.
I say that with regret because I love changing the look of my desk top and the way things are presented, so when I first saw Vista when it was installed I loved it because it looked like a breath of fresh air. But looks are not the be all and end all are they.
I do think the steps MS has gone to stop cracked versions of their software from working is unnecessary. Those that are not willing to pay for their OS end up losing out anyway because they would be unable to get security updates or updates of any kind, which would give them lots of incompatibility issues. I'm sure with the precautions that have been incorporated into the latest OS; it will put off many that would otherwise have purchased the product. So in the end they lose out. BTW, I to hate phone home activation goodgotd; like I hate those advertisements at the beginning of a purchased video. Why should those who are willing to buy the genuine product have to suffer the consequences of those who try to steal.
The problem with ripped off platforms could easily be stopped by having an essential part of the windows system missing from the installation disc. The only way to get this would be to use your serial number to download the missing file. That way, unless you have the genuine serial number you would not be able to gain access to the download link to get the missing file. The missing file could be linked to your CPU’s serial number in some way (like reflexive arcade does with its games), so that the file will only work on the specified computer, thus stopping those who would post the missing file on the net. Yeah, I know, a little convoluted, but not as bad as they way it’s done now, lol.
