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September 04, 2006 | Comments: (0)

The Vista Upgrade Debacle

TAGS: Microsoft

I realize this is a DB blog, but some things effect us all. I just tried upgrading to Vista and it was a mess. I just bought a Toshiba Satellite and it’s supposed to be Vista-ready. I ran the upgrade option on the Vista install, and it went ok. The only thing that it said would need to be updated was my wireless card, so I thought I’d give it a shot and deal with that problem later.
The setup took quite a while, but most of it was unattended; I had to do very little. Then, it got to the final stage and rebooted. It got in this reboot loop where it wouldn’t do anything but try to reboot. After about the 3rd or 4th time I noticed that it was flashing a bluescreen for about a millisecond before it tried to reboot again. So I was stuck. I tried safe mode but that yielded the same results. So I entered setup and it has a repair section there where you can make a number of choices to diagnose the problem. I chose the section aptly named, diagnose and repair start up problems… or something similar to that. It sat there for quite a while diagnosing my box. I let it sit through 2 Law and Orders before I realized it probably wasn’t going to do anything. I then had to go and figured it wouldn’t hurt to let it run while I was gone, so I left for a couple more hours. When I returned, it was still churning and since there’s no progress bar I have no idea what it’s actually doing. I cancelled it and it came back and said that it didn’t find any problems. Ok, fine… now what… I tried the memory test and that came back ok. The only thing left to do was to rollback the installation to XP. I was surprised how quick it was and how good of a job it did. I think I’m noticing a couple small quirks now, but it’s hard to say what’s causing it, so I’m not going to blame it on the rollback.
So, the install rollback is cool, and worked very well for me, but the install of Vista itself was a wreck. Had it given me something I could troubleshoot then maybe I could have fixed the problem. As for now, I really hope they improve the process. Bluescreens are usually driver related, so you would think that safe mode would have done the trick, but no such luck.
Anyway, I enjoy going to the Vista site and looking at all the cool pics of the OS even if it’s beyond me right now. I’m not sure who to be more upset with right now though… MS or Toshiba.

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Posted by Sean McCown on September 4, 2006 06:15 PM

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