Can you buy an "empty" computer?

[russ]

You may need to do some leg work to find the drivers but it shouldn't be a problem at all. Certainly Asus, MSI and Gigabyte have Win XP drivers supplied with all their latest motherboards. It would be commercial suicide for them not to. XP is still the most widely used OS on the planet, to market a motherboard that did not support it would be very shortsighted.

[Merlin66]

Thanks for that guys.

Now I feel much happier with the thought of replacing the ol' Acer with a new larger memory laptop.

[bcfcciderhead]

I have windows 7 ultimate on my desktop which i did myself, i just formated the hdd and then installed windows 7, windows 7 then connected to the web and found all the drivers i needed.

This was on a dell shop bought pc and have had no problems since i done it about 6 months ago, i find that windows 7 is much better then xp, it finds drivers very easy and instals them much better to, i did not need to use the disk that came with the printer, just turned it on and windows did the rest.

[Beulah]

Don't know if I can justify the £100 just for a piece of OS software at the moment, I could buy a decent eyepiece for that..

[Helen]

As someone who bought a windows 7 laptop on Saturday and would like the best of both worlds... is double boot an option? the microsoft site makes it look easy to do.

Helen

[dph1nm]

One advantage of the retail products is that you get 32 and 64bit versions. This might be handy when you find there are no 64bit drivers for your10 year old printer (or whatever).

NigelM

[Aussie]

All my astro software is a year or two or more old and knows nothing of Windows 7.

Wow I've found windows 7 is backwards compatible with every single thing I've tried in it. I use to have win xp home but bought an alienware computer ( i love games) and ended up getting the 64bit because i had 12gb ram. I was surprised to find that everything worked the same on exp even 32 bit operations work perfectly. Windows have done them selves proud with win 7(in my opinion).

Oh and BiziBilder, just buy a new pc with the spec's you want and reformat it.

[Rols]

OEM/RETAIL...who cares...if the sticker aint on the case and left on the packet who's gonna know! sorry sir my eyes aint what they use to be! have you seen the size of that telescope out there!! lol