Will this computer run Vista?

[Ear Booker]

A few months ago a friend at work gave me an old computer he didn't need anymore; the only thing it needed was a hard drive. I used a spare 12 GB drive I had and installed XP for 30 days, and it worked well, but I want to know if it will handle Vista, and if so, how well before I make my descision to keep it as is or upgrade. Here are the current specs as I know them:

CPU: 1.4 GHz (He said it was AMD something; showed up as Unknown Processor in XP)
RAM: 1.25 GB (Not sure of the type; it has two 2 GB sticks that only show up as 1 GB total for some reason plus a 256 MB stick my boss gave to me)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 (128 MB)
PSU: I want to say 230-235W; don't remember exactly.
Motherboard: Not sure either, but I think it's slightly old... doesn't have PCI Express.

As far as my needs go, I don't need much. I'm not much of a gamer... Flight Simulator X would be nice, but I could settle for 2004, and the Age of Empires III trial ran okay on it.

And as a final question, if I decided to upgrade the system down the road, does Microsoft allow you to reinstall Windows on a new computer, or would I have to buy it again?

Thanks for your help,
-Joe

[mairving]

You can run the Vista Upgrade Advisor on it.

A standard Vista install is around 10Gb's so you would need a larger hard drive. If it was me I would leave it with XP. Running Vista on this computer would probably not be pleasant.

[cmichael258]

At the very best, I think it woild be slower than 10 - 30 oil in Alaska. Does it have a DVD ROM drive? I'm told VISTA won't install with CD ROM drive. As mairving stated, you would be better off continuing to run XP on it.

[jayb1234]

Yeah, the Vista disc is a DVD.

[frobro390]

Good afternoon, Ear Booker.

So from the specs that you have listed above you are going to run into a few problems. First and your main issue is going to be the amount of hard drive space that you have in your rig. Bottom line, vista is going to need much more to install and operate correctly. I am running Vista Ultimate x64 on my rig, and it is installed on a 40gb drive. The initial install used almost 22gb of the drive, and this is not including any third party software.

The second issue is closely related to the first. You only have 1.25GB of ram installed, and even that is not working, or matched properly. I have 2GB installed on my system and I still have issues with using Virtual Memory to excess. Your system would depend heavily on Virtual Memory, and unfortunately you will not be able to give the system what it wants with the amount of disk space that you have available.

Your graphics card would be acceptable. If the other parts of your rig were in order, you likely would be able to run Aero and experience the goodness.

The bottom line: You are not going to be satisfied with Vista installed on this machine.

Hope this helps

Tony