Vista Driver Problems

[Hakker-80]

I have been trying to install Vista onto my Mac Pro for testing reasons. Everything works fine except the display which is in 4 Bit colour only!! When i check device manager i can see that the drivers for the 7300GT are installed but it says there is a "Code 12 error, not enough resources availible".

Anyone know how to get round this problem or is it just a problem with the Nvidia 7300GT graphics card??

 

[bpd115]

I have been trying to install Vista onto my Mac Pro for testing reasons. Everything works fine except the display which is in 4 Bit colour only!! When i check device manager i can see that the drivers for the 7300GT are installed but it says there is a "Code 12 error, not enough resources availible".

Anyone know how to get round this problem or is it just a problem with the Nvidia 7300GT graphics card??

You need more than 1 gig of Ram. Ran into the same issue myself until I put in 2 more gigs of ram.

 

[tuartboy]

Yeesh. Your octo is starved for ram in both Vista and OS X. You need to get more in there ASAP or you wasted your $ by making that machine perform worse than the stock quad.

Edit: The stock card runs fine in Vista. It was a bit dodgy with the apple drivers loaded from the boot camp CD, but then after a windows driver update it all fixed itself.

 

[Hakker-80]

How much RAM do you recokn i should get to solve the problem?? Will another 1GB do??

 

[bpd115]

How much RAM do you recokn i should get to solve the problem?? Will another 1GB do??

How much RAM you should go with and how much will solve the problem are two different things.

Bootcamp vista will only recognize up to 2 gig.

I have 3 with a 4 core machine and I'm looking to go to 4 or 6.

With an 8 core machine, you will be ram hungry. Watch your page outs.

 

[tuartboy]

How much RAM do you recokn i should get to solve the problem?? Will another 1GB do??

I know it sounds excessive (however, you did buy an 8-core mac so you seem to be the excessive kind of guy), but a general rule of thumb is 1GB of ram per core. On a core duo system your looking at 2GB to supply both cores with data, but you have a hungry 8-core system and to actually get 8-cores of performance out of it you will want to have about 8GB of ram. Otherwise, you are literally starving the processors and making them perform like the much less powerful (and much less cheaper ) quad/dual core systems.

I have 5GB in my quad and it still pages out under load.

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

You want *at least* an extra 4GB in there. Adding 2gb to my quad for a total of 3gb made a massive difference but I still get page outs and still feel like I need more but alas I can't afford any more right now. The rule of thumb of 1GB/core is about right in my opinion. 512MB/core is ok and doable but anything less than that and you may as well be using a celeron.

 

[Hakker-80]

Cool i will get some more RAM once i sell my PowerBook. Thanks for all the advice.

One more thing i noticed that the current RAM has heat sinks on it. Do i have to buy these seperately??

 

[tuartboy]

One more thing i noticed that the current RAM has heat sinks on it. Do i have to buy these seperately??

No, you have to buy special FB-DIMM ram for the mac pro that has the heatsink pre-installed. I would recommend OWC, but I'm having a nasty support issue right now with them about my Ram, so maybe somebody else can give you some tips on where to look.

 

[cokersa]

How much RAM you should go with and how much will solve the problem are two different things.

Bootcamp vista will only recognize up to 2 gig.

I have 3 with a 4 core machine and I'm looking to go to 4 or 6.

With an 8 core machine, you will be ram hungry. Watch your page outs.

If you get more than 2GB of RAM and want to use it with Vista, you'll need to load Vista 64 bit. Note that Bootcamp doesn't support 64 bit Vista, but that doesn't mean you can't get it to work. A couple of things to note: none of the bootcamp drivers will work ('cause they are all 32 bit), and your current Windows applications may or may not work on 64 bit Vista (you'll need to research this yourself). The drivers will be an issue if you use bluetooth (I had to put away my BT keyboard and mouse in favor of USB devices). You'll need to manually load the 64 bit sound card drivers from Realtek's website. Also, if you want to load 64 bit Vista, you need to make sure you get 64 bit media (I believe it only comes by default in the Ultimate package, but you can order it from MS if needed). You'll need to do a clean install (there is no upgrade from 32bit to 64 bit). If you can deal with those issues, and want to use all your RAM, 64 bit Vista may be a great solution for you. I'm running it and have been very happy overall.

 

[cokersa]

No, you have to buy special FB-DIMM ram for the mac pro that has the heatsink pre-installed. I would recommend OWC, but I'm having a nasty support issue right now with them about my Ram, so maybe somebody else can give you some tips on where to look.

I bought my 2x1GB FB-DIMMs from Crucial, and I am not having any issues with them at all.

 

[tuartboy]

I bought my 2x1GB FB-DIMMs from Crucial, and I am not having any issues with them at all.

My ram runs just fine until I push it really hard. I keep parallels running most of the time and am a huge multitasker (10-20 apps at a time) so I give my ram a real beating. Even with the heatsinks (Apple ram included) soon enough it gets up over 180° and ECC errors appear and often cause a kernel panic.

If you plan on doing a lot of memory intensive apps I recommend getting ram that can withstand the heat because FB-DIMMs can run 40° hotter than the Xeons at full speed.

 

[tonywalker23]

just browsing for some answers and come across this thread . . .

i have a mac pro 2.66 1gb ram, and 7300gt card. i have 4 hd's, mac os x and xp home and backup and one for vista. i got vista on it last night and its the 800x600 with 4 bit color.

from what im reading is adding ram the only fix? im really broke (got vista for $12 through college ms agreement) and cant afford mac pro ram.

any thoughts?

 

[4JNA]

...is adding ram the only fix?

ram is the only fix. at least 2gb to get the video card working under vista.

as a temporary solution (to get more than 4 colors) you can go into device manager (system>hardware>device manager) and scroll down to 'system devices', expand it, and look down the list to find the 'pci express x16 port'. right click on it and 'disable' and then reboot vista. this will kill video card searching for resources, it will still run in vgasave mode (safe mode), but will be in full color anyway...

best of luck.

 

[tonywalker23]

ram is the only fix. at least 2gb to get the video card working under vista.

as a temporary solution (to get more than 4 colors) you can go into device manager (system>hardware>device manager) and scroll down to 'system devices', expand it, and look down the list to find the 'pci express x16 port'. right click on it and 'disable' and then reboot vista. this will kill video card searching for resources, it will still run in vgasave mode (safe mode), but will be in full color anyway...

best of luck.

makes it bareable would still like to have the aero effect but this is a lot better than 4 bit color.

thanks

 

[zauriel]

How much RAM you should go with and how much will solve the problem are two different things.

Bootcamp vista will only recognize up to 2 gig.

This is not true. I just installed Vista Home Premium on my 24" iMac C2D with 3GB RAM and it recognizes it just fine, I didn't have to do a thing. The system information clearly shows 3057 MB.

 

[bpd115]

This is not true. I just installed Vista Home Premium on my 24" iMac C2D with 3GB RAM and it recognizes it just fine, I didn't have to do a thing. The system information clearly shows 3057 MB.

iMacs and Mac Pros are two different computers.

On the Mac Pro, it only sees 2 gigs.

see here
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4325878&#4325878