To Long, Didn't Read: I'm having trouble getting a reliable copy of Windows Vista Home Premium.
I built a new gaming computer and I had all of my old parts lying around. I wanted to play Fallout 3 and the wiki has an enormous guide to getting it to run with Windows 10, since it was built for Windows XP and Vista. Obviously the sensible, levelheaded thing to do was to use my old machine and one of those old OS's to run that one, single game. I should note that the computer in question uses the following:
CPU: Intel Core 17 2600
GPU: EVGA Nvidia Gtx 560 (Yeah, I know it probably can't handle high res graphics mods)
RAM: 16GB (4X4GB) Corsair Vengeance DDR3 at 1600MHz (in blue)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3-iSSD Rev 1.0
My mom actually managed to get a Windows XP installation disk for $10 that seems to let us use it's activation key an indefinite number of times. I'm not sure what exactly the deal with that is, but I assume it either means Microsoft doesn't care about licensing an OS they can't profit from, or it has something to do with the fact that the disk doesn't look like it's for consumer use. It claims it should only be used on Dell systems, despite it working fine with my mom's Apple and my custom machine. All of that is beside the point, I have Windows XP and the game installed and working great. Well, as great as a Bethesda RPG can run... Anyway, here are my issues. I only have access to a 32 bit copy of XP, 64 bit copies exist but only the Professional version, which seems hard to find, the Profession version was only updated to Service Pack 2, and Fallout 3 runs on Service Pack 3.
As I said, I do have the game running fine but I'd like the option to mod it with higher resolution graphics and I just don't really like not using all of the resources I have. Windows Vista Home Premium can use my full amount of RAM and let my CPU run at 64 bit but Microsoft obviously doesn't sell it anymore and physical disks on ebay are mostly 32 bit and many look pretty sketchy. I wouldn't mind torrenting an iso file but I don't have any experience with that and I'm nervous about malware. So, could anyone help me find a way to get a working copy of Vista Home Premium (or better)? And any comments or advice on this fairly silly project would be excellent as well. Thank you.