Is'nt the RC1thats out right now Vista Ultimate? My friend wants to get Vista on his home pc so he ran the Vista upgrade advisor and that told him that Vista Home Basic is the recommended OS for him. Is there another Vista program that he can download right now that his pc can handle? Here's his pc's specs.
Compaq Presario
3400+ AMD Athlon 64 Processor
512 MB Memory
160 GB Hard Drive
DVD+RW LightScribe Doublw Layer 16x drive
Graphics= NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS PCI Express

Vista ultimate has all the features of all the other versions of vista. I would recommend the ultimate version even if the advisor says you don't need it. The advisor asks some basic questions and then just recommends a version based on what windows thinks you will be using the computer for. My PC has lower specs than that and it runs vista perfectly, so it isn't a case of his specs. Ultimate has features like Media Center, Windows DVD Maker and others that aren't on the home basic edition.

With beta 2 you could download different versions. with RC1 the code for all the versions is on the same DVD. If you like you can install without a product key. after you confirm you don't want to enter a product key you will be prompted to select what version you want to install. select whatever you want. the only downside is that it will only run for 14 days then you have to do a clean install or enter a valid license key, which by default will be for vista ultimate

hope that helps

Originally Posted by XxTripleBeamxX

Is'nt the RC1thats out right now Vista Ultimate? My friend wants to get Vista on his home pc so he ran the Vista upgrade advisor and that told him that Vista Home Basic is the recommended OS for him. Is there another Vista program that he can download right now that his pc can handle? Here's his pc's specs. Compaq Presario 3400+ AMD Athlon 64 Processor 512 MB Memory 160 GB Hard Drive DVD+RW LightScribe Doublw Layer 16x drive Graphics= NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GS PCI Express

The only thing wrong with this setup is the limited RAM. Add another stick of memory to make it dual channel or better yet, replace it with 2 - 1 Gig dimms. That computer should run Vista just fine.

you can run and install windows vista ultimate on that machine and windows will downscale everything but the ram will defintly hold it back. When i start it up it automatically starts using 50% of my pc ram. (I have 1.5 gbs) Thats 756 being used just on startup so it will most likely lag. Does he have a un-used flash he could use readyboost to increase the ram although it only works on some flash drives.

If you try to load from the standard Vista disk, it will automatically check to see what your computer is running and cater itself to your computer's abilities.