Gaming Setting up Vista for the first time.

Rayder

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Long post, bear with me....

My brother and I are setting up our first Vista PC. It will mainly be for recording HD stuff from TV and to compliment our 52 inch Samsung LCD HDTV. Might play the occasional game on it, but it won't be it's primary function.

Specs:
Asus P5Q-E motherboard
Asus 4670 video card
2gig RAM
Haupauge 2250 2-tuner HD TV card
PC desktop case with 7 inch touchscreen on it
Intel Core 2 Quad 2.66
2 1T Seagate drives for storage of recorded video
1 512gig Seagate to use as C:
Lite-on Blu-Ray combo drive
Vista Home Premium 32bit
650 watt PSU

It's mostly up and running, except for a few issues.

1. The Windows help window seems to come up off screen and we can't see it. I've tried going to a higher resolution thinking maybe it got placed too far over to the right when we lowered desktop res....negative. I'd go to the taskbar and select "move" to try and bring into view. Didn't work. So even though it's mostly useless anyway (in my experience), we cannot access Windows help.

2. Adobe Flash player causes IE to become unresponsive, as if IE itself sort of locked.....but it's not 100% locked....hard to explain....it will bring up the very first webpage, but then anything else you click on will act like it's having trouble loading it. We can't click on any further links or buttons within IE and the only thing we can do is restart Windows. As soon as we uninstall Flash, then internet is fine.....minus Flash of course.

3. We couldn't turn on AHCI mode......I set the mode in BIOS, installed Vista and the next time I looked in BIOS it was back to IDE mode. If I try to change after install, Vista won't boot and just keeps restarting before it ever gets passes the little loading bar thing.

Now, we don't plan to overclock anything, so we have nearly everything in BIOS just set to AUTO. We're currently running Catalyst driver 8.12.

While we have 4gigs of RAM for the system, we currently only have 2gigs in it because we were told Vista 32 can't handle 4gigs. But we saw an option in BIOS to reallocate RAM for 4gigs. Should we try that?

At this point, we are at a dead-stop because of these issues.

I know asking about these issues on a video game forum may not yield much result, but I thought maybe just the right person will read this and know what's going on, so here it is. I HAVE posted nearly the same thing at a couple of hardware forums, so.....

Help?
 

sage_inferno

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2. "Adobe Flash player causes IE to become unresponsive."
Happens to me aswell using Firefox for now on the laptop.

3. your desktop motherboard resembles mine so vista32bit should use 3GB of the 4GB you have.

"But we saw an option in BIOS to reallocate RAM for 4gigs. Should we try that?"
DONT mess around with the Northbrigde settings.
Leave them alone.

Are the RAMs inserted in the same colored slots?
Check to see if they work one by one before pairing them together
 

Minox

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32 bit sytems are able to recognize 4 GBs or RAM, but due to limits of the 32 bit Windows structure you're only going to be able to utilize about 3GB of the total 4 GBs unless you install a 64 bit OS.
 

p1ngpong

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For your RAM issue you could try using a flash drive as a readyboost. Its not quite RAM more like an extended page file, but it should help. Readyboost supports up to 4gig, it could help out your performance.
 

Rayder

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Well, we got all our issues worked out. Flash wasn't working because of some security settings in IE. Windows help was working, but it was going to the secondary screen on the case which has the iMON stuff displayed and it was under that. I dragged it back to the primary screen. As for the 4gig thing, we just enabled the RAM allocation thingy in BIOS and it worked fine. We see about 3.25gigs of RAM available......good enough.

Now we get to start installing utilities and games and whatnot.

So, it's all good now.
 

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