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So I finally took the jump, I’ve posted about Windows Vista with my thoughts and in the interests of openness I went out and bought a copy.  I borrowed my brothers’ Dell Lattitude D505, reinstalled Windows XP Pro Sp2 with the Dell build cd, and using my PC World supplied Windows Vista Home Premium, I took part in a live Vista upgrade and evolution experience.

So here we go, £199 of my money was spent on Vista for this test. The laptop specs as follows: (typical spec like my IBM T42 etc)
Dell Lattitude D505 with bios A03

• Pentium M 1.5GHz
• 1GB RAM
• 40GB Hard drive
• Intel integrated video 855 chipset
• CDRW and DVD combo drive
• Wirless PCIMCA card

I wiped the computer, put in my windows 98 cd, ran fdisk and used the Dell rebuild cd to put everything back together as it should be, in essence to make it as close to factory default as possible in the interests of being fair.

Part 1 – how do you get the cd out the box?

After fiddling with the box, got the cd out ok, booted the computer to windows xp, inserted said cd and the following happened.

It autoran and said did I want to run the compatibility thingy? No, just install please

Do I wish to go online and get the latest updates? – not really I haven’t got any anti virus/firewall stuff isn’t that a bit risky?

• I type in my license key
• Which kind of install do I want?
• Upgrade
• Custom/advanced

Hmmm, I think oh hang on, I only have one option You cannot upgrade from Windows XP Professional to Windows Vista Home Premium apparently it told me, but £249 for Ultimate was a bit much. Apologies.

• I do advanced, and press next, it’s found my disk, cool, next
• It copies the files, this takes 10 minutes, very cool.

25 minutes later after several reboots and actions, it takes me through screens and says can you enter location, username, select wallpaper, set next time zone, click next and then it does some performance test for a while and reboots, within 1hr it’s ready to go complete at the log in screen.

I type in my username martin and the password and the next post are my thoughts…

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