Dell Vista Troubles

I got my Dell Vista Express Upgrade package on Friday, 16 March 2007. The upgrade process was... interesting.

The upgrade process with the Dell Upgrade Assistant DVD went smoothly up until Vista Express Upgrade DVD was going through its process. After the first reboot, blue screen of death (bsod). Tried it again. Same error, same numbers. Consistency is usually good. But not in this case.

Switching to a clean install, by booting the Vista DVD, produced a bsod immediately after clicking the "Custom (Advanced)" (i.e. clean install) button. Tried it again. Same error, same numbers, but different addresses than the upgrade process. Again, consistency is usually good. But not in this case.

After an hour on the phone with Dell support (thankfully I still have priority support), the tech remembered a trick they had to use once before: delete and format the partition. Of course, the Vista DVD wouldn't get to the partitioning. My old XP Pro CD, oddly enough, also blue screened. My Linux Knoppix CD came to the rescue.

So here I am in a clean install of Windows Vista. My only other disappointment with moving to Vista is that the Express Upgrade Vista DVD contains only the 32-bit edition. I originally had planned on moving to the 64-bit edition of Windows Vista with this upgrade. From what I was reading, both 32- and 64-bit versions were bundled together. Now I've decided that unless I get a DVD free (free shipping, too), I won't move to a 64-bit version of Windows until it's necessary to upgrade. I'm thinking another couple of versions of Windows.

Vista looks nice. The clean install appears to have slightly better performance than XP MCE. Application compatibility is the only drawback. I'm only installing applications that have been shown to work with Vista.

I'm still waiting for that "wow" moment I'm supposed to get with Windows Vista.