Degen.Net

It’s 11PM on a stormy Friday night and I can’t get to sleep so I figure, “hey let’s start my Vista upgrade, what could go wrong!”

First off, I run the Vista pre-install inspection validation thing, after it grind away for a bit it comes back with a series of messages indicating that I have a couple of verboten apps (Nero and Alcohol), so traveling the safe route go ahead and un-install these, reboot and let the install/upgrade begin.

My first choice is do I want to hit MS (internet) prior to the install to incorporate any new Vista updates; sounds like a great idea, so I give it a go. After about three minutes of a scrolling progress bar the message pops back that this connection could not be made and I will need to run updates later.  Ok, sure whatever, next.

Ah, next comes the opportunity to enter my Software Key. I slap in my MSDN Vista Ultimate key – ok done. Thinking… Thinking… Another few minutes go by, and I’m confronted with a list of apps that might not work under Vista. This appears to be the same as the list I say in the Analysis tool I ran before, these are listed as warnings only, so I proceed with upgrade.

Finally I get a screen with some kind of numerical progress info.

Coping Windows Files XX% …

Gathering Files

Expanding Files

Installing features and updates

Completing upgrade

After about 20 minutes of grinding away, the Vista Upgrade was ready to reboot and continue the install.

Upon reboot my lilo Linux boot loader, was gone – in its place a windows boot selector, with options to load the previous version of windows (XP Pro) or to continue the upgrade, when I selected continue I was greeted with the Blue Screen of Death; just lovely.

I verified that my XP install was still intact – thank goodness, next let’s scrap the upgrade and go with a fresh install. 

So about an hour or so invested to discover that just like many previous builds of Windows, in-place upgrades are not the way to go 🙁.

I have to be honest after a couple of days at CES being hammered by the Microsoft media juggernaut, either I’m coming around to Vista, or its just an acknowledging that “resistance is futile”, either way – The folks from Redmond have made a very compelling argument for not just their new flagship OS and its on merits, but it’s integration with XBOX 360 and the web services like Live.

So, I’ll bite: I’m in the process of upgrading one of my XP Pro boxes to Vista Ultimate.  This should be interesting on a number of levels? Will an in-place upgrade work, what are the issues putting various versions of Vista atop old MS OSes (can move from a Pro platform to a home version?) what will my dual boot Linux partition do? All this and more!