Well, when I bought the laptop, it can with Windows Vista preinstalled BUT I received a free upgrade option to Windows 7. I bought it on July 2009.
I do not have any Windows Vista discs and the only discs I have is Windows 7 upgrade kit...............
You should be OK. If the disc was provided by your computer manufacturer then they don't really have a loophole.
Thanks for clearing this up for me. When I first bought the laptop from Gateway, I found it strange that no Windows Vista disks were provided. But they only provided an option to get the Windows 7 upgrade disk for free.
So, if I face any serious issues with my laptop, is it OK to just do a clean re-installation of Windows 7 by using just the upgrade disk?
Cheers!
Hello,Thanks for clearing this up for me. When I first bought the laptop from Gateway, I found it strange that no Windows Vista disks were provided. But they only provided an option to get the Windows 7 upgrade disk for free.
So, if I face any serious issues with my laptop, is it OK to just do a clean re-installation of Windows 7 by using just the upgrade disk?
Cheers!
Most computer manufacturers don't provide installation discs anymore. They provide an image of the installation on a recovery partition.
You will be OK using your upgrade disc to do any future installations of Windows 7.
If you want to make it a little easier on yourself, next time you perform a clean installation make an image of your install and keep it on an external HDD. If you ever needed to reinstall again you can reload the image you backed up and be up and running in 10 minutes.
Here's a tutorial on how to do so.
Backup Complete Computer - Create an Image Backup[2]=Backup Restore
Before you do a clean install of windows, you should try a 3d benchmark utility. This will stress just the video card. If your computer has the driver issue or locks up, you will know that the video card is the problem. That will mean having to send the computer in for repair. Please try the software below to stress the video card.
NVIDIA Fluids technology Demo download from Guru3D.com
Chrome Engine 4 demonstration movie download from Guru3D.com
If you do have to send the laptop in, most of the time you can send it in without the hard drive. That way, you wont have to worry about your data.
OK, thanks for the reply! I downloaded these two softwares and there is absolutely no problems with my video card. I even played the demo with Windows Media Player 12 and real player and there was no problems. So it cannot be a video card issue.
But whenever I watch Flash videos like Youtube and tick enable hardware acceleration, an error message comes out which says Display NVIDIA Windows Kernel mode driver version 257.21 has stopped responding and has successfully recovered. The video also turns green in colour.
I had no issues when I untick enable hardware acceleration.
I am using the latest Flash player which is 10.1
Any ideas? Is hardware acceleration important?
By the way, this forum is very helpful and understanding to newbie members like me!
Well, I reported this problem with Adobe and they told me they gave me this answer:
"Opened internal Flash Player bug: 2647887 on June 21 AM. We will report back here when we get members of the Video/Hardware Acceleration team involved and understand the issue.
Thanks for the report."
So I guess this has to be a bug in enabling hardware acceleration with Flash Player 10.1. So this is not something to do with my graphics card.
Moreover, the same error message appears whenever I try to play some videos over the net. But this occurrence is pretty rare, to say the least. I guess the problem has got to be with the video files itself.
So I guess there is nothing wrong with my graphics card or drivers. This problem is an external issue.
:):):):):):):):)
Quote