VistaUpgrade
Latest
Dell's "Express Upgrade" to Vista not so "express"
Dell-using Vista hopefuls are expressing their frustration at Dell's continued delays and problems with their Vista upgrades. The fiasco started right when the Dell Vista Upgrade site opened for business, with the sudden flood of visitors being blamed for site crashes, delays and error messages, and downtimes lasting as long as 24 hours at a time. Even after Dell stabilized the website, reports were rampant of the site not recognizing certain service tag numbers, or informing users incorrectly that their system wasn't eligible for the upgrade. Phone support was little better, with one phone jockey telling a customer "Your machine's processor is only at 667 Mhz speed. You will have to upgrade it before you can get the Vista upgrade." Turns out Dell's guy was reading the RAM speed off the spec list. In the midst of all these problems, Dell has been slowly pushing back the ship date for the upgrade discs, with the latest official word being late February: "We expect to begin shipping upgrade kits to customers within the next couple of weeks." That might be well and good, but Dell is processing orders on a first-come first-served basis, and some users are being told to expect a 6-8 week wait for their discs. Dell blames these added delays on continued testing of driver compatibility, along with continued site kinks, but they do claim to have eligibility problems ironed out, so at least that's a start. If your experience with Dell's upgrade has been any different -- or just as hellish -- we'd love to hear it in the comments.[Thanks, Roy B]Read - Dell Vista Upgrade siteRead - Official word from DellRead - The story from a disgruntled forum member
Clean install workaround for Vista upgrade discovered
Well, it looks like those hoping to do a clean install of Windows Vista with an upgrade-only edition of the OS may not be entirely out of luck after all, although they'll still have to jump through a few hoops to get it done. According to Daily Tech, you can get around that pesky requirement to have Windows XP or Windows 2000 already installed on your PC by instead using the upgrade DVD to first install a 30-day trial version of Vista --that's done simply by not entering the product key when prompted to do so during the installation. Once you've got the trial version of Vista up and running, you simply start the installation process all over again from within Vista, this time entering the product key when prompted. After that's done, you should be staring at cleanly-installed, fully-functioning version of Vista, not once having set foot in Windows XP or 2000. As Daily Tech points out, this seems to suggest that any Vista upgrade DVD can function as a full retail copy of Vista, although it would also seem to be something that Microsoft could put the kibosh on pretty quickly, so you may not want to lose sight of that copy of your old OS just yet.
