A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my desktop PC to Vista. In my experience, Windows needs to be wiped and reloaded about once a year to get rid of built-up crud and it was about time for my XP installation to be reloaded. Since I had a copy of Vista Ultimate and was going to have to reload XP anyway, I gave it a try. A couple of friends who are also considering this and asked me how it went.
I made complete copy of my C drive using DriveImage XML (freeware) in case something went wrong and I needed to revert. I ran the Vista Upgrade as I had read this totally wipes your Windows directory and copies over your XP stuff into Vista and there was no performance benefit from doing a fresh install. I got a lot of programs so I decided to try to save time doing this. In retrospect, I might do a fresh install next time.
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- One of my 2 video cards didn’t work at all under Vista so I had to throw it away and buy a new one $$.
- Norton Antivirus doesn’t work either so I had to uninstall it and reload a fresh copy from Symantec site. The reinstall lost my license info so I had to reload that too. Annoying.
- My HP 2600n color laser jet was not supported so I couldn’t print anymore. HP says they will have a driver in June 2007. A few weeks later I found the proper driver on another HP site (!) and was able to print.
- QuickBooks 2006 is incompatible with Vista, so I had to order a new copy of QuickBooks 2007. Note: there is no upgrade pricing so you have to buy all over again. Thanks Intuit. $$$
- Two programs I rely on: VMWare and Ultramon didn’t run under Vista. Fortunately, there are betas of these two out which support Vista so I was saved.
- I had to go and download new native approved video, webcam, keyboard and mouse drivers from vendor sites even if the vendor was Microsoft in some cases. That didn’t make much sense to me.
- I synced my Windows Mobile Smartphone using the new Windows Mobile Device Center. It tried to duplicate all my data between the Smartphone and Outlook. Unbelievably bad.
- iTunes 7 will sometimes just stop playing working. No fix.
- Console2 (another favorite) also will just stop working sometimes. No fix.
Posted over 2 years ago
Several months back we installed a version of vista onto one of our office machines, only to find many of the desktop applications we ran needed updates we found several device card drivers were also required, after spending 2 days trying to get the relevant drivers we decided it was best to reinstall xp and wait until there were more drivers available, this was in early 2007 and we still are in two minds to changing our computer systems.
Posted over 2 years ago
I noticed you did this conversion back in may 2007, its now January 2008 and a friend of mine still has issues trying to get hold of vista drivers for his Laptop, he actually decided to call it a day and revert back to windows XP pro, as many of his applications had issues with vista and more than 3 days wasted, we also are software developers and develop hospitality software, which means setting up point of sales systems for our users, we use Wepos and XP Pro, and I think will wait until vista supply a good SP disk covering a lot more than it currently does.
Posted over 3 years ago
Thank you for this substantive review. You've stated just as I've guessed would likely be the case. Can you tell me [us] what is the <em>advantage</em>, if any, to actually doing the "Vista Upgrade"? My opinion-- as far as Windows goings (being myself a Fedora Core 5 user as well), I find Windows XP to be a fine O/S ... er... uh... i mean, what have they done to improve upon the concept? XP is fine with me. Should I really bother with an upgrade? The only benefit i can see is in the Corporate environment-- when dealing with those which may have installed spankin' new machines for their people/ plan to upgrade to Vista-- i fear i'd lost some of my wherewithal. I'd like to read your own commentary on my remarks, Mr. Vidal , please. Thank you!