Windows Vista Vista Upgrade Experience

Having recently acquired a new laptop I decided to try out an Upgrade to Vista Premium over the XP Pro install on the old laptop, an HP Omnibook xe4100 1.2 Mhz Celeron, 512 Mb RAM.

Vista Upgrade Advisor Beta OK'd the install with the note that the S3 graphics drivers would need updating plus the modem drivers (this was strange since the same modem works quite happily with an install of Vista on my second desktop).

At the start of the upgrade there was a request to stay connected to the Internet for the duration of the upgrade to download updates, followed a little later by a request to uninstall AVG and Windows Defender(!!!) as neither was compatible with Vista.

So there we are upgrading, connected to the Internet with no AV - not too clever, but if the computer was trashed it was not a problem

4 1/2 hours later the upgrade completed and the computer booted to a black screen with just the Vista build info in the lower right hand corner. No surprise really as it had been indicated that a driver update was needed - so into Safe Mode - another black screen with just the Safe Mode text in the corners. Not good - no screen so how do you search and update the graphics drivers?

I had noticed on the final boot an option to roll back the setup to the previous OS. Selected that and was back in XP within 10 - 15 minutes - unscathed.

Then set about looking for S3 Vista drivers - as far as I can see there are none for the S3 Twister - the drivers that are available are all for S3 PCIe cards.

Accepting that the Vista Upgrade Advisor is in Beta the message would seem to be - don't trust it.

At least my new laptop - HP nx6310 Intel Core Duo has a Vista Ready sticker - so when the time comes that should not be a problem

 

Hi McTavish

Thinking back over what I did last night I had a message when I hit roll back - 'Installation unsuccessful' - and roll back was available. Good safety net

 

Yes, if the upgrade fails, you can roll back. Once the upgrade succeeds, no rollback.