I know nothing about much of this, but can i instal vista on my computer, which has a amd athlon M4 thunderbird 1.4gz processor? i have tried but says i need a bios update, can't seem to find one anywhere.

Many thanks

Vista is very memory-hungry and needs 2048MB of ram to run reasonably smoothly, which your motherboard may not support. Please give more details of your hardware.

Not really a good idea. If you want to run Vista, get a new system.

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MSI K7N2 Delta2 LSR|35w XP-M2400 11x214 1.62V|2x512MB OCZ EL 2 2 2 11 2.9V|9600XT|Seasonic 350w
Abit AN7|XP-M2800 10.5x227 1.62V|2x512MB Mushkin XP4000 2 3 2 11 3.2V|9600XT|Seasonic 550w
Asus A7V600|XP-M2600 6-11x202 1.6V|2x512 Crucial PC3200 2.5 3 3 9 2.7V|PCI 32MB gfx|Corsair 450w

If you have company setup then you can install but if you have duplicate setup then don't install if you have install with duplicate setup then after some days some files has injured..so be careful

Download and run the Vista Upgrade Advisor.

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A8N32 SLI-D, FX57, DDR600
6800 Ultras(SLI), Raptors (RAID0)

Well, the system has 1GB of ram. I have run the Vista Upgrade advisor and it says Vista is fine for the system, except that it is not compatible with the onboard graphics card - an SiS 630/730. The main problem is when i come to install Vista i get an error message saying that the computer is not ACPI compliant - and yet ACPI is switched on on bios settings.

Make sure you have the latest BIOS ffrom the motherboard manufacturer's website.
If you do, or it still doesn't work, try this:

Do a reinstall (maybe you'll have to do it a couple of times) to pick a different HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer).

At the very beginning of the install, when it asks if you want to press F6, press F5 instead.

Choose one of these HALs in the next screen. One of them should work:

ACPI Multiprocessor PC
ACPI Uniprocessor PC
Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC

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A8N32 SLI-D, FX57, DDR600
6800 Ultras(SLI), Raptors (RAID0)