Mine died- and the laptop came with no software cd's. Anyone know how to get my copy of Vista back onto the replacement drive? Or if I can snag a copy of XP somewhere?
if you have the receipt and serial #, microsoft will usually mail you a replacement copy of whatever OS you had. i recommend UBUNTU a very cool linux, that comes with an office clone, a photoshop clone, etc, etc, and is absolutely free. google it. and never get a virus again. or any of microsofts crap alerts and such.
I second the Ubuntu recommendation. You might as well try it out while you are waiting to get a hold of a M$ Windows CD.
Yeah, but can I use skype or my poker program on linux? It's true I might as well take a look at so I can use the new drive, though.
Skype, yes. Poker game, depends. Feel free to PM me if need help with Ubuntu or Linux in general. VC is to basketball as I am to Linux....well I don't make as much money as VC, but I know Linux inside out . With a little bit of tinkering you can get most Windows programs working under Linux.
I'm using kubuntu (KDE4 desktop version) on most of my systems. I run vista in virtualbox in a window for the few windows apps I really need to run. It runs flash and java, so it'll possibly run your poker program. If you haven't bought a new drive yet, you might look at the WD Raptor drives. At 10K RPM, they're noticably faster than other drives, and using your computer will feel a lot faster with one of those.
Yeah, I've noticed my roommate's computer is much faster than mine, despite having pretty much the same processor speed and the same RAM. It might be partially be her hard drive- but I already bought the same 5200 version. The other thing I think it is that she runs XP.
How full is your hard drive? I've noticed that not having a lot of hard drive space free can really slow down an OS.