Ask Me Help Desk - Vista Nightmare!

I recently "upgraded" from XP (great OS) to Vista (huge mistake). I was walking around the local Office Depot. A force from the Dark Side lured me to the display of Vista OS software. Had a little extra cash on me. Read the box and saw all the delightful and alluring marketing jargon. The words "Upgrade" were in bold letters on the front. Bought it. I'm now in hell. The first thing that happened is that my Compaq Presario R4000 laptop didn't want to take the new software. It wouldn't accept the product code. Had to get on the phone with an East Indian fellow who sounded like he had a mouth full of elephant dung. After that long and tedious ordeal, I was finally up and running. Hooray! Wait a minute... something is wrong here. No audio. Where's my audio? Locate my audio driver and try to get it up and running again. CRASH! System scrambled then all went blank. Brought system back up in safe mode. Returned to last safe settings. Whew! Up and running again but still no audio. Contacted Windows. Too cowardly to reply to numerous requests for help. Contacted Compaq. After several attempts, finally spoke with this kind East Indian lady (no elephant dung but still difficult to understand). She finally located a Vista compatible audio driver and sent me the downloadable info. Very nice of her but didn't work. Out of frustration, decided to write a letter to Microsoft. Went into Word wordprocessor. Not there. Gone. Lost in never never land. Went back to Office Depot and paid another $250.00 for Windows 2007 (not nearly as good as the last version but will have to do). Still living with no audio and a lesser version of Word but, hey, there are starving people out there. Will settle I guess. Anyone with similar horror story?

Hmm, not really a horror story, more like a surprise.

I had installed the retail Vista Ultimate on a basic PC to get a feel for Vista. I knew I would be upgrading the system, with more ram, faster cpu, etc. so I though I had the 30 day trial period to work with. Nope. I left the PC on for a few hours, came back and boom, It tells me, that Vista has been successfully activated.

Aw crap. Now when I do upgrade, I'll need to go through the hassle of re-activating. What a bunch of bs.:mad:

Anyway, you might want to use your recovery cds and go back to XP. Then hold on to Vista until it matures a little bit, or maybe install it on a desktop PC. :)

You no doubt have had the laptop for awhile and have a lot of different drivers and files on there... new OS files don't play nice with old OS files. Device drivers are probably the single biggest problem with upgrading. This much you've discovered. ;)

Here is your best bet... (IMO)
Back up all your data.
Boot from your XP CD and reformat your hard drive then re-install windows XP SP 2.
Install all the latest MS patches for XP.

At this point you have two options...
If you don't have it, upgrade your laptop to 3-4 Gig of RAM (seriously)
Install the Vista upgrade.
... or better yet...
Salt and burn the upgrade copy of Vista and scatter the ashes over sacred ground so it will ruin your computer no more.

Yes you will have to re-install all your programs and restore your data from the backup but this is the best way to ensure a successful update.

Now in five years when the successor to Vista is released you will (hopefully) remember this lesson:
NEVEVR buy an upgrade, ALWAYS buy the full version and install it from scratch.

I could give you a few horror stories about clients of mine who tried to "upgrade" to XP from 2000 but it sounds like you're living in that hell right now. Fortunately none of them are in any rush to install Vista.

Quote:

Originally Posted by HVAC888

Hmm, not really a horror story, more like a suprise.

I had installed the retail Vista Ultimate on a basic pc to get a feel for Vista. I knew I would be upgrading the system, with more ram, faster cpu, etc., so I though I had the 30 day trial period to work with. Nope. I left the pc on for a few hours, came back and boom, It tells me, that Vista has been sucessfully activated.

Aw crap. Now when I do upgrade, I'll need to go through the hassle of re-activating. What a bunch of bs.:mad:

Anyways, you might want to use your recovery cds and go back to XP. Then hold on to Vista until it matures a little bit, or maybe install it on a desktop pc. :)

Thanks for the response. I tried to use my XP recovery CD but the built-in Vista protection (which is pretty good when it comes to navigating the web) considered XP some sort of threat and would not allow the download to take place. I just have to live with the fact that I am stuck. I just wanted to warn any other would-be flies to avoid the Vista spider web.

What about upgrading from vista home premium to ultimate on a dell e 1505 using the anytime upgrade, would that be real bad?

Quote:

Originally Posted by ActionJackson

Thanks for the response. I tried to use my XP recovery CD but the built-in Vista protection (which is pretty good when it comes to navigating the web) considered XP some sort of threat and would not allow the download to take place. I just have to live with the fact that I am stuck. I just wanted to warn any other would-be flies to avoid the Vista spider web.

Try to boot from the CD. You may have to change your BIOS settings to do that though.

[QUOTE= Now in five years when the successor to Vista is released you will (hopefully) remember this lesson:
NEVEVR buy an upgrade, ALWAYS buy the full version and install it from scratch.

Thanks for the good advice. I've never considered myself a computer whiz. I'm certainly on the road to becoming one though. My stepson needs something better than what he already has so I'm considering giving my old friend to him and just buying a brand new headache of some sort. Something that already has all the bells and whistles pre-installed.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ActionJackson

Thanks for the good advice. I've never considered myself a computer whiz. I'm certainly on the road to becoming one though. My stepson needs something better than what he already has so I'm considering giving my old friend to him and just buying a brand new headache of some sort. Something that already has all the bells and whistles pre-installed.

I bought my kids a new Dell a few months ago with Vista on it... I wanted to get XP but that was not an option and I don't have the time to build them one from scratch... even if I did, quality aside, it's tough to compete with Dell prices. You would think an Intel Core 2 Duo with 2G of RAM would scream but the thing clunks along slower than my AMD X2 3700 with the same amount of RAM. If you want it to move as fast as an XP computer I'd recommend 3-4G of RAM and the fastest video card you can buy. The quad core CPU's are coming out later on this year... I'm waiting till then to get myself a new computer and even then you can bet I won't be installing Vista! :)

Quote:

Originally Posted by metfan

what about upgrading from vista home premium to ultimate on a dell e 1505 using the anytime upgrade, would that be real bad??

Not really sure on that one myself... you might be OK but don't hold me to that.