throwexception said:
Loading things into RAM has costs. RAM access and HDD access has costs. They tie up I/O pathways in motherboards and CPUs and prevent "real work" to be done smoother.

It's like having this fictitious zr1 that travels everywhere predictively -- if enough such zr1 exists, we'll get phantom traffic jams on key traffic junctions because it has pushed up the volume of traffic on roads needlessly.

If this is indeed what Vista does, it's stupid. You can't speed up an OS by preloading, it only causes needless resource consumption and I/O contention.

Because, you know, it costs no resources to rewrite the ram? As soon as, say, a game starts loading, the files read from the hard drive are immediately stored in the memory. It writes a bit as a one or a zero; there's no penalty for another bit already being there.

If your system is sitting idly while you're away doing something else, who cares if it's loading a commonly used program from the hard drive? Preloading is not going to consume the entire bandwidth of the system bus, let alone any significant amount.

craig001 said:Well, since I am back in school I may go for this since my desktop is acting up.

I had Vista Ultimate & Office 2007 and ended up going back to XP Pro & Office 2003. The interface and the fact that everytime you wanted to do something a permission pop-up appeared sent me away. Does anyone know if this was changed for SP1?

HAve you tried google?

All you have to do is turn UAC off.

Install everything then turn it back one if you want it or leave it off.

Dragonsnack said:holygrail said:just a reminder, if you are a collage student, you can get those for 10$-14$ with academic discount. It remain valid as long as your a student and you can keep it after you graduate.

Would anyone mind expanding on this? I've done a myriad of searches and cannot find Vista or Office software for $10-$14 anywhere with any sort of academic discount.

Some (though not all) colleges have campus-wide agreements with Microsoft that allow the students to get the software pretty much for the cost of media. Typically the cost is about $6 for the CD and they have Vista business and Office 2007 available, but again, this only applies if the college has paid MS for a licensing agreement that covers this.

Why is it called the "ultimate steal" when I have to pay for it?

bump.
It is not still up in their site. any one knows when it will show up?

WTF?

I ordered the Vista. Got an email with a link that went to a page with a download button. It also says the download is about 2.6GB. But all the download button does is save a file named: X14-63452.exe which is about 83MB. When you execute it it creates a folder named Vista thats about 195MB and apparently starts an install which fails because it can't find a bunch of files!

You can't get any other info from any of the links in the emails. Digital River has many of their links broken. For example if I click a link to see my invoice it bounces me to the initial login screen to see if you are eligible for this offer.

I was with vista support for oven an hr. and it took an hr for them to figure out there are issues with this promotion.
I was told we will be refunded and will be asked to get the media instead.
let us wait for the e-mail.
I can give the contact numbers too.

Me too. Here is the error message when trying to extract the executable.

'Windows Vista Setup Preparation cannot find one of its required files. Please ensure that VistaSetupPrep.exe, boot.wim and install.exe were downloaded to the same folder. REturn to your digial locker for product support. View Purchase History and click on the support link for windows Vista.'

We will wait and see what happens. I opened up a support ticket with them.

I also got the problem with upgrading my current vista business. It was shown an error when I double-click the file I downloaded which is about 82 mb. I don't know how to resolve this problem. Did anyone has any resolution to it? Please Help!!

disastar said:Why is it called the "ultimate steal" when I have to pay for it?

If you really want the ultimate steal I think you have to use torrents...