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    D630 Optical drive and OS relationship?

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by dpilot83, Jun 16, 2007.

  1. dpilot83

    dpilot83 Notebook Consultant

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    Why does getting Vista Ultimate require getting a different optical drive?

    I'm considering getting a nearly barebones D630 (only upgrade is the 2 Ghz processor and the Vista Ultimate compatible optical drive but I'll stick with Vista Basic for the OS) and then using linux on it until SP1 comes out for Vista. At that time I'll buy 4 gigs of RAM and a copy of Vista Ultimate. Why are the optical drives different? Shouldn't any drive work with any OS? Will it just plain not work if I decide to mess around with Vista Basic for a bit before reformatting and sticking Linux on there? Will Linux treat the two drives differently?

    If what I'm planning on doing sounds odd, I'll explain my reasoning. Otherwise, you can ignore the rest and just post your thoughts on my original question. I eventually want Vista Ultimate with 4 gigs (Dual booted with my linux distro of choice). However, I want to pay Dell as little as possible for ram. Any ram I buy from them is a waste since it'll just be sitting in a box somewhere because I'd have to buy 4 gigs elsewhere and replace anything that comes with the system. They require you to buy 1 gig of ram if you want to get it with Ultimate pre-installed.

    Getting Basic instead of Ultimate saves 150 bucks

    Getting 512 MB instead of 1 GB saves 70 Bucks

    Total savings, 220 bucks.

    You can currently buy a retail box version of Vista Ultimate for around 290 shipped and this comes with both the 32 bit and 64 bit versions so I can play around with either just to experiment and learn. So basically I'm spending 70 bucks extra in the long run (not too important to me) and 220 bucks less in the short term (pretty important to me).

    Anyways, what problems am I going to run into with this optical drive delima? Thanks
     
    dpilot83, Jun 16, 2007
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  2. dpilot83

    dpilot83 Notebook Consultant

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    I may have answered my own question. I guess the software installed for the burning is different if you use Ultimate. That doesn't make sense though because why would the software be compatible with lower versions of Vista but not compatible with Vista Ultimate?
     
    dpilot83, Jun 16, 2007
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