M
Mudder
Guest
A while ago I posted a question about Windows Vista. The thread asked if you would be upgrading or not and your reasoning.
Well…… I did decide to go the upgrade path and this is my tale of woe and final victory from the “Vista Warsâ€.
My old system “gave up the ghost†late last year and I decided that instead of building another system I would just go out and purchase a box from one of the multitude of computer manufacturers out there. I looked around a little bit and came up with a nice deal on a Hewlett-Packard a1560n. A nice little system with a 2.8 gig dual core processor, 2 gig of memory and a 300 gig serial ata drive with Windows XP media center edition installed. Overall it has been a good system but I neglected to install the Windows Vista beta on this machine to “test†it as the documentation with the system says that it is “Vista Capableâ€. More on this later.
I received a Staples reward check in the mail and had a couple of gift cards to use up so I trotted off and purchased the Vista Home Premium upgrade and figured that I would dual boot until the bugs got worked out and I was comfortable with the operating system. This was an ill informed decision because the “upgrade†can only be installed from inside of the operating system and if you are looking to dual boot then you should spend the extra $80.00 for the full version. No problem I thought since I had bought multiple licenses when I upgraded the other computers in the house to XP pro, I would set up a dual boot to XP pro and then install vista and nullify that license.
So I boot up the XP pro CD and begin the installation only to be stopped cold because XP does not have the Serial ATA drivers built in and it could not recognize my drive! Oh well, a minor annoyance, I’ll just call HP and get the driver and be on my way. I call HP support and was told that the drivers do not exist? What the heck do you mean there are no drivers I ask the tech, How did you get XP on the machine then? “Well sir, we don’t manually install the operating system. We use a disk image that is prebuilt for the system. The best I can do is suggest that you call Asus because they made the motherboard and they should have the drivers that you need†Next call is to Asus tech support and they tell me that there are no such drivers available and I would have to go back to HP for support.
Dang it! There has to be drivers out there somewhere so I google for 2 days and had no real luck. I found a lead last night and it took me to the Intel website where I found the drivers in what they call the Intel Matrix Storage Manager program.
Almost had success but my USB floppy did not seem to be supported by XP either. It now has become a challenge and I hate to lose. Search around for an internal drive and cable and install it in the machine. Boot off the XP CD and hit the f6 key……….Whala, I can now see my hard drive and can install XP onto another partition. Woohoo! We’re cooking with gas now! I get XP installed and boot into that, Pop in the Vista DVD and it installs without a hitch. Only problem was that it was waaaaaaay past my bedtime and I only got to install a couple of programs before I had to give up for the night and go to bed.
If your not comfortable upgrading your operating system I would suggest that you either have someone else do your upgrade of wait until you replace your computer to get the new Vista Operating System. I think that it only succeeded because I’m so dammed stubborn and thick headed to let that computer get the better of me. This was by far the hardest operating system upgrade that I have ever experienced and I do not think I will be upgrading the operating systems on my other computers anytime soon as I think it caused a rise in the blood pressure and I don’t want to be having a heart attack because of a stupid computer.
Well…… I did decide to go the upgrade path and this is my tale of woe and final victory from the “Vista Warsâ€.
My old system “gave up the ghost†late last year and I decided that instead of building another system I would just go out and purchase a box from one of the multitude of computer manufacturers out there. I looked around a little bit and came up with a nice deal on a Hewlett-Packard a1560n. A nice little system with a 2.8 gig dual core processor, 2 gig of memory and a 300 gig serial ata drive with Windows XP media center edition installed. Overall it has been a good system but I neglected to install the Windows Vista beta on this machine to “test†it as the documentation with the system says that it is “Vista Capableâ€. More on this later.
I received a Staples reward check in the mail and had a couple of gift cards to use up so I trotted off and purchased the Vista Home Premium upgrade and figured that I would dual boot until the bugs got worked out and I was comfortable with the operating system. This was an ill informed decision because the “upgrade†can only be installed from inside of the operating system and if you are looking to dual boot then you should spend the extra $80.00 for the full version. No problem I thought since I had bought multiple licenses when I upgraded the other computers in the house to XP pro, I would set up a dual boot to XP pro and then install vista and nullify that license.
So I boot up the XP pro CD and begin the installation only to be stopped cold because XP does not have the Serial ATA drivers built in and it could not recognize my drive! Oh well, a minor annoyance, I’ll just call HP and get the driver and be on my way. I call HP support and was told that the drivers do not exist? What the heck do you mean there are no drivers I ask the tech, How did you get XP on the machine then? “Well sir, we don’t manually install the operating system. We use a disk image that is prebuilt for the system. The best I can do is suggest that you call Asus because they made the motherboard and they should have the drivers that you need†Next call is to Asus tech support and they tell me that there are no such drivers available and I would have to go back to HP for support.
Dang it! There has to be drivers out there somewhere so I google for 2 days and had no real luck. I found a lead last night and it took me to the Intel website where I found the drivers in what they call the Intel Matrix Storage Manager program.
Almost had success but my USB floppy did not seem to be supported by XP either. It now has become a challenge and I hate to lose. Search around for an internal drive and cable and install it in the machine. Boot off the XP CD and hit the f6 key……….Whala, I can now see my hard drive and can install XP onto another partition. Woohoo! We’re cooking with gas now! I get XP installed and boot into that, Pop in the Vista DVD and it installs without a hitch. Only problem was that it was waaaaaaay past my bedtime and I only got to install a couple of programs before I had to give up for the night and go to bed.
If your not comfortable upgrading your operating system I would suggest that you either have someone else do your upgrade of wait until you replace your computer to get the new Vista Operating System. I think that it only succeeded because I’m so dammed stubborn and thick headed to let that computer get the better of me. This was by far the hardest operating system upgrade that I have ever experienced and I do not think I will be upgrading the operating systems on my other computers anytime soon as I think it caused a rise in the blood pressure and I don’t want to be having a heart attack because of a stupid computer.
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