I finally bought a copy of Windows Vista Home Premium and installed it on my son’s machine last week. I’m saving the most exciting thing I learned for last, so stay with me. I have to say, it’s very easy on the eyes. It runs very smoothly with the Aero interface. Here are the original specifications of the machine from Dell:
1 C3823 PROCESSOR, 80547, PENTIUM 4 PRESCOTT DT, 520, SKT-T
1 F3105 BASE (ASSEMBLY OR GROUP), MICRO-MINI TOWER, PENTIUM 4 PRESCOTT DT, 520, 4700
1 N7965 MODULE, SOFTWARE, WXPHSP2, DIMENSION, ENGLAND/ENGLISH, NO DOCS/DISKETTES, DELL AMERICAS ORGANIZATION
1 R5017 MODULE, DUAL IN-LINE MEMORY MODULE, 512, 2X256, 400, 1R, 512
1 R0473 MODULE, FLOPPY DRIVE, NO-FD, 212, DIMENSION
1 U3976 MODULE, HARD DRIVE, 40G, I, Serial ATA, #1, WD-XL80SD
1 H3793 MODULE, MODEM, SONNY, INTERNAL, DATA FAX, DIMENSION, DELL AMERICAS ORGANIZATION
1 K2810 MODULE, DIGITAL VIDEO DISK DRIVE, 16X, IDE (INTEGRATED DRIVE ELECTRONICS), HALF HEIGHT, LITEON, DIMENSION, MIDNIGHT GRAY
The RAM has been upgraded to 2 Gig and the video to a Geforce PCI express card with 256M ram.
I have to say I really like this OS for my son’s machine. The Aero interface is nice but not that exciting if you’re used to using Beryl on linux. The clincher for me is the Media Center (not included in Vista Home Basic). Combined with the Hauppauge PVR-150 tv card already in the machine, tv watching/recording on this OS is by far the best I’ve seen. The media center essentially gives you TIVO. You really just have to experience it to appreciate it. Media center also gives you a section with alternative online content such as Turbonick and XM Radio (if you have a subscription), that is very comfortable.
Ok, so I really like Vista on my son’s PC… Here’s something I learned yesterday:
I already own Windows XP, and I bought the retail upgrade for Windows Vista Home Premium. I wanted to do a clean install instead of running the upgrade from within XP. So I booted from the Vista DVD, formatted the hard drive, and installed same as always. Soon I realized that it had not asked me to put in my old XP disk or product ID. Uh oh… Sure enough it installs (approx 40 min.) and I can’t activate my new OS. I get an error that says something about “you bought an upgrade license, you can’t do a fresh install.” Oh well, it says I have 30 days, I’ll call Microsoft and sort it out later… Yesterday I decided to call and get it sorted out. In the meanwhile, my son had settled into Vista, personalized it, installed games, blah blah blah… I explained to the support guy (who was very good, by the way) what I did and that I couldn’t activate Vista. His first words were something pleasant that I don’t remember exactly but that summarized into me being screwed and needing to start all over with installing XP first and then upgrading from XP to Vista. I had pretty much accepted that I had to start over but the support guy told me he would find out if there was any possible way to activate the software without starting completely over. After conferring with his people, he came back on the line and said possibly we could put the Vista disk in and try the Ugrade option. To make a long story short, (40 minutes later) it worked! All my son’s settings were saved and I was then able to activate Vista. The tech guy stayed on the line the whole time to see how it came out! My first thought was that this would be handy in the future because I wipe a lot of machines. It saves me having to run down an XP disk everytime. My second thought came shortly thereafter and I asked the tech guy “You realize I never put in my XP disk or XP product ID in right?” He didn’t seem to want to discuss it much so I thanked him and we parted ways.
So do they even sell a retail full edition? What besides the honor system requires you to buy anything but the upgrade?