About 2 months ago my father brought me home a used computer that was supposed to be great, it was a hp slimline, 250gb, dual core processor, with 1gb ram, all uprgrades from what i had...Iknow not great by today's standards, but he got it for cheap...anyways. it was supposed to come wquipped with vista, once i fired it up i seen that it had xp instead, which was wrong, even more so it showed that it only had a 30gb hard drive, and 512mb or ram. i just assumed that he got ripped and they had swapped hardware. well i went to take it apart tonight cause i intended to use the motherboard and processor, but when i pulled it apart i seen that all the right hardware was actually there. When i tried to load up the system recovery it couldnt. I have an older slimline so i new a little about them. It cant seem to boot in safe mode either. So my question is, is this a problem with the way they installed xp on this? would reinstalling vista possibly fix the problem?
Does the hard drive show up as 30GB in computer management? If not, it is just how they formated the drive when they put a pirated XP on there. A proper vista re-install would fix this. Also, you might have 512MB ram dedicated to video...that would drop system ram to 512mb. Vista/XP/Linux has nothing to do with this issue; check your bios.
In the bios it reads everything correctly. Just not when in the drive management center. thats why i was heading towards the faulty install.
