Gnutella Forums - View Single Post

Peerless · #25 (**permalink**) August 20th, 2007

lets face it...you're a gnutella network user, and being real that means to use the stuff you have downloaded you pretty much need a windoze machine...run from Vista...get an OEM version of XP pro, and while 64bit would be grand a heck of a lot of programs need 32bit to work properly AFAIK...the only disadvantage of OEM is that it is locked to a certain BIOS code on your MoBO upon first registration so you can't transfer the OS to a new machine...UNLESS that machine has the same MoBo or close to it...as an example, this machine I'm using right now (MoBo, CPU, and OS HDD's) originally resided in another physical MoBo...and the MoBo's are exactly the same...the old one was an ASUS P4C800e-deluxe but I found that it had a faulty fourth DIMM slot when I finally added in another 2X512 set of matched sticks to use a full 2GB of memory...so I had to RMA it...if you have paid attention THIS machine is my internet machine so obviously I would just up and DIE if I didn't have internet access...so I took the MoBo from one of my DAW's and put all of the other parts (cpu, ram, video, HDDs, etc) and put them in an ASUS P4C800 deluxe (notice the subtle difference, the-e deluxe has an ICH5R (RAID) southbridge, and other is just an ICH5 (non RAID)...I'll skip the whole long story of the subtle differences, but The_Point is that the machine started right up (woops...except for the MoBo detecting the different (NEW in the MoBo's eye) and having to forceably enter the BIOS and changing some settings..oh yeah, then I had to fix a missing NTDLR file...it was after this was resolved that the machine started right up) and didn't even hiccup over the change in the MoBo's...they are exactly the same (hence no change as far as XP OEM was concerned) so window's doesn't even realize that this is the case...in fact you could probably make a set of machines using the same MoBo's and install just one OS of them, use the same serial...and Micro$oft update probably wouldn't hiccup either!...

OEM saves you quite a few bucks compared to the 'retail' version...I ended up using XP MCE on this machine just because it was $10 cheaper than just XP Pro...Pro has a few other networking capabilities than MCE does but this can be 'hacked' so no problemo...you can even spend a few more bucks and get the IR receiver and remote and go the full MCE package...that costs about $40 bucks more...anywho I do heartily advise you BUY an OS and be confident that the only hair up your a§§ will be those created/allowed by M$...