I am planning to upgrade to vista ultimate to take advantage of the windows media center. Is there any way to get the media center without the upgrade and will my external hard drive need to be reformatted causing me to lose everything once i upgrade???? Any help will be much appreciated. My computer is a Toshiba Tecra A6 with an Intel Duo Processor 1.83 GHz 1022 Mb RAM and a 32 bit operating system. Thanks for your help
15
Aug/10
Upgrading your operating system will not cause you to lose all your files, but you should do a backup of your files just in case something goes wrong in the process of upgrading. However, with that processor and RAM, don’t expect to have the smoothest operating system.
if you doing an upgrade, you will not lose your data and your hard drive doesn’t need to be reformatted. You only need to reformat your hard drive if you do a “clean install” of Vista Ultimate. I believe your RAM is 1GB, may i suggest an upgrade to 3, otherwise you will have a slow system.
As everyone said, you won’t lose data (it says in the book), but I can tell you that I did just that (upgraded to Ultimate) and didn’t lose a thing. So, in this case at least, Microsoft is telling the truth.
Are you trying to get Media Center for connecting an Xbox 360? If so, there is a download link on Microsoft’s (Xbox 360) website.
If it’s for other uses, you will probably have to upgrade, the processor seems good to run it but you may need more RAM, at least 2GB.
Hey Zack-
The only way to get Windows Media Center is through Vista Home Pemium or Vista Ultimate- it is not available as a stand-alone download. Here is an article outlining some of the cool features you can take advantage of with Windows Media Center: http://lifehacker.com/software/hack-attack/turn-your-windows-pc-into-a-media-center-powerhouse-on-the-cheap-298408.php
Be sure to backup your data so that in the infrequent case something does go wrong you will still have your data available.
Cheers,
Jeff
Windows Outreach Team