Dalo Harkin

On the actual Motherboard will be a name (brand such as ASUS, GIGABYTE, MSI) and there will also be a model number P5K premium - GA- *** and so on. Or if that fails take a pic of the board and post it here, at least from that I can tell you if its AGP or PCI-E

Hi, We need to know what MOBO (Motherboard) you have. As a rule of thumb for Nvidia cards the first number is the series of the card and the higher you go the better they are :)

Only trying to help you from Nerfing your PC :D

We need to know the MOBO make and model and does it have an AGP or PCI-E slot?

When you go to device manager - where the USB host controller is double click it and there should be an 'update driver' option, do that and have any cd/dvd that you got from Alienware in the cd/dvd drive and it 'should' find the drivers. Vista 'should' find these from windows update under 'optional hardware updates'

Running a defrag at the best of times can cause some problems. If you run a defrag on a drive that may be faulty then you could end up killing the drive completely

biggest question when looking at GPUs is the screen size of the monitor you intend to use it on.

When you say its slow, do you mean gaming performance? or just general usage? 4GB of ram is ideal, but is it configured correctly to run at full specification you could have the fastest RAM in the world and not configured correctly would be like old DDR400 :D Dont run defrags as they can often hinder more than they help regardless what anyone says. and as for reg cleaners the same is true. check you have all the drivers for your devices in device manager and also check how many processes are running in windows and at start up. for startup type msconfig into a cmd window then on the furthest right there is a startup tab - click on that and it will show whats loading at startup (dont untick things willy nilly though :eek:)

Your MOBO should have come with a disk, thats the one that will have the drivers, not windows. While most Intel ethernet adapters are covered in the 'OS standard' drivers some are not and will be on your MOBO disk, alternatively as KenB has said give us the MOBO make and model and we can find it for you

Right, A blinking cursor just means the BIOS is looking for something to load, which it cant. you should have a sticker on your laptop somewhere with the Vista key on it (unique) you can use one of your friends GENUINE Vista disk and then use your own key When the BIOS says press F12 for boot order you need to do that and it should say:- * CD/DVD rom drive * Floppy/removable device * HDD When an OS HAS been loaded and booted up for the first time the HDD should really be placed at the top of the list (and the others DISABLED) If your HDD is not at the very top of the list or labelled as 1st boot device put it there and then SAVE and EXIT the BIOS - see what happens

Glad we could help :)

This normally happens when the files you are trying to move were created using a program that you dont have on the system trying to do the moving. For example if the files were say excel or word, and you dont have office on your new machine they would show as files, but you couldnt open them in something other than say notepad (if notepad was the only program on your system that would open this file extension they would be displayed as notepad icons not word or excel) hope this makes sense, you need to right click on one of the files you are trying to move and see the extension it uses for example Microsoft Office Excel Worksheet (.xlsx) type the extension into google and install the relevant program again and all should be well :)

Also onboard sound can be disabled from within the BIOS, if whoever had the board before you had an add in sound card (PCI for example) then they wold have disabled the BIOS sound to avoid conflicts

Its up to you, but I personally would say that the HD5870 is overkill for that resolution

Well that MOBO is listed as a Gateway build (I thought they went out of business :confused:) anyhoo if you are sure that the GPU will fit in your case and you have the adequate power needed...... out of interest what size is your monitor as this may be an overkill GPU

Is nothing at all happening when you insert the CD - as in can you hear it spin up in drive or anything like that? Can you go to control panel and then hardware and sound, then device manager - is the CD/DVD rom listed or are there any yellow exclamation marks next to anything?

Oh dear........... Yes if you have blank disks, you are meant to use the utility that nags you to create restore CD/DVDs to do just that....... when you start the PC/Lappy do you get a black screen (similar to a POST screen) saying for example:- load system then it says along the lines of recovery sector or Windows Vista with a drop down? If you dont have the recovery partition or recovery disks then your in for a tussle as you need to source EVERY single 'unique' driver and on ACERs there are a few of them :eek: What OS was on the PC/lappy when you got it? and give me the model of it and we can go from there

Hi, Dxdiag does not tell us what MOBO you have, can you please list your MOBO make and model please... and we can go from there, as you are using a phenom chip (triple core) then the PC is not old enough to have anything other than a PCI-E slot or two on the MOBO so it will fit the MOBO. BUT will it fit in your case as these modern cards are huge in size and some cases cannot take them if your HDDs are mounted to the right of the PCI-E slots for example you may have to move your HDD to its lowest/highest mount to fit the card in. Also you would need at least a 500-600 Watt PSU

Hi and welcome, Can you remove the link from your sig though please (its in the rules that they are not allowed and can be classed as spam, I have seen some of your posts and you seem to be trying to help rather than hinder) :)

The only thing I could find on Alienware older models was this http://support.alienware.co.uk/Support_Pages/Restricted_Pages/driver_downloads.aspx I would uninstall the USB drivers from device manager and then reboot the lappy, it should find them again automatically. USB 1.0 drivers and standard OS built in ones, so you need whatever disk that came with the lappy named 'drivers/utilities' in the drive and when it asks for the driver set it to search the disk

All true however, my SCSI drives 15,000 RPM does leave most SATA II and III drives for dust :D not bad for 'old' kit

I would also try and remember what the last thing you did on the PC before this happened - any new drivers? changed any settings? installed/removed any hardware/software. if you can get into safe mode then open command prompt and type msconfig this will give you what loads up on the (startup tab furthest right) you can tick/untick, if there is anything you are unsure of then let us know and we can help

Hi and welcome to FPCH :)

if its picking the autorun.exe as a virus dont jump to the conclusion that it is, there are many false positives, but as you have said if the hologram around the outside of the disk is a sticker then its a fake. If you post a pic i'll tell you if its genuine or not. The company may have a volume licence key and then just burn images of the original disk (which is naughty, but seen worse on ebay :eek:) seem them where people actually just write office 2007 on the disk lmao

lol - just had a flash of Jar Jar binks in Star Wars ' mysa give up'