Microsoft Windows Vista Business UPGRADE [DVD] 
Good
5
It's late at night and this will be a quick review based on my experience with VISTA business. I've only used the product for a week.
First, i'm at experienced PC user and like to always keep up to date with the latest hardware. I was reluctant to upgrade to VISTA at first because it didn't support my online postage provider's software (so I thought) as well as a game I play (that's now supported, but wasn't at first).
The one big thing that held me back from the upgrade is that Microsoft sure loves to confuse the customer. Until I ran the Upgrade Advisor I had no clue that the Vista Home Premium Upgrade couldn't be used to upgrade XP Pro without a clean install. In the end I had to go with this version. I normally refuse to upgrade an OS without doing a clean install first. That's for a very good reason! One last thing I don't like about Vista is that you can't do a VISTA clean install with the upgrade without first installing XP. Why is this?
So, I opened the box and put the disc in after removing several programs from startup such as my anti-virus program. The upgrade went perfectly fine and I ran into no problems at all. I was never once asked for a driver disc. Really.
At first I was surprised at how much background hard drive activity there was at first even when the system was not doing anything. I fixed that by disabling some things in Vista that run in the background. That seemed to help and I don't experience this as much anymore. Overall, programs seem to run just as fast as they did in XP. Maybe a little slower, but I haven't noticed much at all.
All my old programs ran fine. My online postage software, Internet Security software and even my Video Capture program. So far I haven't found anything that hasn't run properly, but that'll probably change soon.
I did however have one graphical glitch. There was a weird halo effect around my mouse pointer. It seemed to clear up a little bit when I installed some new Nvidia Beta drivers for my 7800GT. It still occurs, but rarely.
I also had some problems with the Windows Switcher randomly going to non-3d mode. I didn't realize at first it will not work in 3d mode without the Aero theme enabled. I don't understand why this is.
To be truly honest, i'm generally not a fan of Microsoft products. I'll use them and that's about it. I really thought i'd hate Vista, but I actually like it.. a lot actually. Sorry to sound like a commercial, but I really enjoy using it. I really have no clue why it's so expensive though! The price is way too high. The basic edition is priced ok, but I don't get why the other versions cost so much more.
I'm sure i'll come up with some bad things to say eventually. A few things have been annoying, but I can fix them with a little work. I'm quite annoyed that at default you can't delete or save to the root directory of C: without special permission. No big deal.
The backup feature is nice. I currently have my entire drive backed up every morning at 8am through the Windows Task Scheduler. There was no "easy" way to do this. I had to do some checking online for the settings to add this to the task scheduler.
I also found it strange that the other got I received an error message saying I couldn't edit video from an external drive without copying it to my main drive first! Hopefully I can figure out why this occured. Something I can fix quickly I hope.
Overall, I like it a lot. I definitely wouldn't bother installing it on a computer that's over a year old though. I imagine it would be pretty slow.
4-302-2007 UPDATE:
I've had way too many problems with VISTA. I've wiped my drive and reinstalled XP. Several programs would not run at all or crash for no reason. Even with the latest versions. I also found that several of my old programs ran incredibly slow. I have a fairly high end PC too with 2gb of ram. I kept everything updated and was never able to fix all my graphical glitches in VISTA at all. At first some of the "annoyances" didn't bother me, but after weeks of using this version of Windows i've just gotten sick and tired of them. I felt like I had no control over my system at all. I also did not feel safe using Vista. There's always something going on and using up CPU power without it showing up in the task manager. I understand this is how VISTA works, but it's annoying and I never tried turning off these features.
Just a note that if you want to reinstall Windows XP you'll most likely need to wipe the hard drive. I tried four times and couldn't reinstall XP with Vista still on the drive. It was pretty much hell and I gave up and wiped the drive. Back to XP. I now feel terrible for giving this OS a 4/4. I'd now give it a 3/5.
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Bad
76
I've just finished upgrading to Vista Business using the Upgrade DVD. During the upgrade from Windows XP pro, the upgrade failed. Because of the timing of the upgrade process, I was left with a non working machine. Every attempt I made to fix the broken upgrade failed as well. As I saw it, the only way to fix this was to install an clean version of the OS to get back to my data. Unfortunately I was wrong (I'll get to that later.) During the clean install, when I entered my product key I was informed that the key was only for upgrades, not clean installs. But, at this point, what could I do, the upgrade failed and my machine was dead. There was an option to not enter the product key at this point, and re-enter it after the OS was running. SO... I continued with the install. After that the install went quite smooth, Vista is up and running on my machine right now as I right this warning message. It looks cool, there are a few issues such as my bluetooth wireless drivers aren't available yet, but I knew about that in advance when I ran the upgrade adviser. BUT now for the BIG issue. When I attempted to use my valid product key to activate Windows Vista, I was informed that my KEY wasn't valid because I did a clean install. After spending 2 hours arguing with MS tech support, they basically told me this... I had to do a clean install of XP and then attempt to do the UPGRADE again!!! WTF!!! They expect me to spend another 8 hours (after I've already spend 5 hours to this point) putting XP back on just to ATTEMPT the upgrade again (which might fail again!??!!?) OR my other option is to spend $299 for the Full install version to avoid the 8 hours of wasted time. This is complete bull! I've been working with MS products for a very long time and every "upgrade" product in the past allowed you to do a clean install if you provided a valid key of a previous product during the clean install process. This product isn't ready for you! Please save yourself time and energy fixing issues that MS should have had worked out. DO NOT buy the UPGRADE DVD, because you are risking $200 on a possible upgrade failure, then will have to spend a lot more time OR another $300 to get another product key.
16
About half of my software and hardware will not run on Windows Vista. AutoCAD Land Desktop 2005 will not work or will AutoCAD 2007. My printer and plotters will not run on Windows Vista because there are no Vista drivers for them. Vista might be good for people that plan on just using it for surfing the internet and using MS Office but for people with businesses it doesn't make sense because there is absolutely no support for it from third parties like AutoCAD and Dell or from Microsoft itself.
14
Slow from power on pc to desktop and shutdown slower than XP as well. As other reviewer mentioned you cant use upgrade DVD to ever do a clean install if needed, in the past XP allowed that. The speed of the Vista once loaded feels the same to me as xp but it just seems like they could had trimmed some time off the boot up or shut down.
1
It installed easier than XP and looks nicer. Beides that there does not seem to be that much different than XP. I have to click confirm or deny about every 5 secs. Hopefully this will be changed in a future update. I would wait as long as you can before upgrading, or maybe buy a mac.
