John In Detroit said:
My suggestion is don't upgrade lessen you have no choice.
John -- that's pretty much my situation. As a developer I must be able to make sure my SW works OK w/Vista -- and for the most part, it does. But there are a few issues. So my help desk person on one of his computers and myself on one of mine have done the upgrade -- both to the vanilla "basic" package. The experience was probably somewhere between frustrating and maddening.
My help desk person is a pretty heavy duty hardware and networking guy -- and it took him a total of 16 hours to complete his upgrade. He came away from the experience mumbling to himself. From this I knew I was in trouble.
Prior to running the upgrade (in my case on an XP Home machine), I followed the suggestion to run the on-line assessment program from the MS site. It informed me that I only had one issue to keep me from upgrading -- then gave me a list of the problems I would need to address "after" the upgrade. Seems I didn't have enough free disk space on my C: drive boot partition. So I increased the size of that partition and tried again. BTW, you do need at least 1g of RAM and 2g is suggested, and 10g free space on your boot drive.
Now things began to move along -- until the 1st reboot. I then got the blue screen of death. A reboot at that point "can" be had back to the XP desktop to try to figure out what is wrong from just the blue screen w/no error messages -- just hex addresses. I then began the chore of going to various websites to download the latest drivers from the SW I was told initially that might cause problems "after" I did the upgrade. It takes about 1/2 hour or so to get to the 1st reboot to find out if a certain new driver fixes the problem -- so by 3AM I was still getting the blue screen over and over after each 1/2 hour of waiting for it to possibly appear.
Will not bore you with more detail -- other to mention I finally found a Vista compliant firmware upgrade to the BIOS on my motherboard. Burning in a new BIOS is always a fun thing to do on a completely up and running operative XP machine that before the attempt to upgrade ran just fine.
Anyway, that was the glitch Vista didn't like -- and I was then able to complete the upgrade. Actually, it's not complete because I am still trying to figure out some of the small glitches in certain SW that need to be upgraded themselves now. But I am booting to Vista now.
But John -- OTOH, just as with each upgrade to Windows, if SW is to increase it's abilities, the hardware it runs on must do the same. I recall going to Windows from DOS kicking and screaming -- and it was almost as bad when XP hit the shelves. Now that I have this puppy up and running, my love of computer toys is kicking back in and I am having fun with the new stuff. So far I am just playing with sound and graphics -- but even that alone makes Vista much nicer than XP. My only disappointment so far (to demonstrate my level of computer genius) is that a right click on a card in solitaire "only" moves that card up to the stacks -- and "I" have to find any others that will go as well. However, when a card is moved from a stack on the bottom, I don't have to click the next card to turn it over.
The desktop "Sidebar" is a nice feature as well -- and the "gadgets" that can placed there to enhance one's desktop are nice. Am running some benchmarks on SW loops in my programs to check out the increased speeds that have been advertised -- so we shall see what internal stuff has been added and/or improved. Am also checking out the security stuff and networking features. Would like to have gotten into the remote desktop improvements, but my Home Basic Vista OEM DVD from Fry's at $99. was all I could afford this week.
It is for sure best to go to Vista as part of a new machine that already has it installed. OR, if you must upgrade -- go to the vendor of your mobo and get the latest Vista approved Bios firmware. Unfortunately, I found this out "after" searching the web after my first blue screen. BTW, Google keywords such as "Vista and Blue Screen of Death" if you want to find tons of stuff posted by those trying to find out why Vista will not install on their computers . . .