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After finding that my school will never, in fact, offer vista at some sort of discount I've decided I'm going to have to settle with getting the cheapest version of home premiumI can.
So my question is, what 'steps' should I take before I upgrade up to vista. Get drivers ready, backup the registry? Clean out temporary directories? My 'install' of windows is a little messy, originally being from a laptop. Should I go through and clean out the device manager before the install? I'd like the install to go smooth and require as little manual cleanup as possible.

And you're upgrading to Vista... why?

As with any OS, do a clean install.

The primary reason is that I want full dual-core support, which older HALs do not support. Also, I plan on having a directX 10 graphics card for crysis, so there is also that. It wouldn't make sense to buy a fresh copy of XP.

Buy a OEM license.

Most stores here sell OEM if you also buy somthing like a USB cable, and it is much cheaper than a regular license.

There is no difference betveen a OEM and regular exept OEM is only supposed to be sold with a new computer.

You should run the Vista upgrade advisor to see if there are any incompatibilities before attempting to upgrade. As for drivers, you only really need your graphics card drivers for Vista and maybe your network cards/wireless cards (depending on how you access the internet - if you use a dial up modem Vista will recognize it as it will most network/wireless cards but better safe then sorry). After you have internet, Windows update should fix you up with all the necessary drivers if they are available at all (which is why you should run the advisor before). The reason for manually downloading the graphics driver is that it usually comes with a utility to better control your graphics card which is not available if you download it using WU - for the other components there really is no need for such an utility.

After that the clean install is the way to go. I'd recommend backing up your data manually for documents and such to a different partition/drive then the OS, although Vista's Migration Wizard is pretty competent. When doing the clean install I'd recommend setting up a separate OS/programs partition and a data partition (if you don't have it that way already or don't have multiple hard disks) so that you can have easier clean installs in the future (by clean install we mean deleting the OS partition and installing Vista on that clear partition - this can be done during Vista setup) by just deleting the OS partition.

InnocentBystander wrote:The primary reason is that I want full dual-core support, which older HALs do not support. Also, I plan on having a directX 10 graphics card for crysis, so there is also that. It wouldn't make sense to buy a fresh copy of XP.

I thought you were upgrading from XP to Vista. If it's a choice of fresh copy of one or the other, then I suppose it makes sense.

Faram wrote:BThere is no difference betveen a OEM and regular exept OEM is only supposed to be sold with a new computer.

The Vista OEM license is more restrictive in that it can only be used with one computer; and the activation system now checks for that.

Back up every thing you want to keep onto DVD or CD

I keep most applications and data on a separate drive, but I do have a few things kicking around on both my windows partition and my Documents and Settings partition. The stuff sitting there isn't hugely important, but I'll make sure to backup the stuff there anyway.

I'm hoping that the upgrade will be able to migrate my registry, as I don't *really* want to reinstall all my programs. I'm looking for a quick upgrade that'll let me get use of both cores. Over the summer I can do a clean install if need be.


The upgrade isn't going to touch the data/application drive right? Should I unplug it for the upgrade just to make sure it doesn't screw stuff up?

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:I thought you were upgrading from XP to Vista.

I am...

Netko wrote:You should run the Vista upgrade advisor

I ran the upgrade advisor, it said it might have problems with a few apps, like Visual Studio 2003, which seems odd, but thats not a big deal. It reports that nero has to be uninstalled before the upgrade however, and I'm a little confused about that. Not a huge deal, but a bit annoying.

Faram wrote:Buy a OEM license.

Too expensive, the academic upgrade version is $75, newegg wants over $100 for the oem.

I would strongly recommend a clean install, there have been pretty common issues with upgrades (or more specifically old settings) that cause problems (stuff failing for no reason, flaky behavior) which can then only be fixed by a clean install.

If you already have stuff partitioned, you don't need to do anything except remove data you want to keep from the OS partition. You could try running the migration wizard (from the Vista DVD) and then going custom and migrating those settings you absolutely must have (for instance, I used this method to transfer my e-mail settings). Unfortunately, the whole point of a clean install is to nuke the system settings, so you'll have to reinstall the apps.

Oh, and VS does have problems, apparently, because of the debugging abilities. VS2003 doesn't work, while VS2k5 has been patched to work. If you have MSDNAA access you should be able to get it for free or discounted.

If you're upgrading from an existing copy of XP, why mention that it wouldn't make sense to buy a fresh copy? Anyway, getting Vista now for DX10 is a bad idea. When there's actually a killer app that requires it or significantly benefits, I could see it, but that probably won't be for at least another year unless you consider a port of Halo 2 a killer app.

I would strongly reccommend against using using Vista if you must use VS 2003.NET.

Upgrading from XP to Vista seems like such an utterly pointless thing to do. Do you really expect your day-to-day computing experience to be improved so much that it's worth the hassle and expense?

Netko wrote:I would strongly recommend a clean install, there have been pretty common issues with upgrades (or more specifically old settings) that cause problems (stuff failing for no reason, flaky behavior) which can then only be fixed by a clean install.

If you already have stuff partitioned, you don't need to do anything except remove data you want to keep from the OS partition. You could try running the migration wizard (from the Vista DVD) and then going custom and migrating those settings you absolutely must have (for instance, I used this method to transfer my e-mail settings). Unfortunately, the whole point of a clean install is to nuke the system settings, so you'll have to reinstall the apps.

Urk I don't like the sound of that. I suppose I could try and migrate bits of my registry for particular apps, but I have a feeling at that point it would be faster to just reinstall.

Guess I'll give it a go and hope for the best.

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:If you're upgrading from an existing copy of XP, why mention that it wouldn't make sense to buy a fresh copy

Because it wouldn't, I need a fully copy of an operating system to get both of my processor's cores working, I plan on taking advantage of directX 10, it wouldn't make sense to buy a copy of XP if I need to buy vista anyway. I've also heard that its memory management is improved, and I'm hoping between the second core and the better memory management I'll see a marked improvement in Supreme Commander.

phongn wrote:I would strongly reccommend against using using Vista if you must use VS 2003.NET.

Thats odd, I'd think microsoft would support visual studio, 2003 isn't that outdated. But I've got my laptop if I need to work with VS2003. They are going to patch it eventually, aren't they?

I'm getting the distinct feeling that you're going to be seriously disappointed if you're looking forward to a significant gaming performance increase by going from XP to Vista.

InnocentBystander wrote:Thats odd, I'd think microsoft would support visual studio, 2003 isn't that outdated. But I've got my laptop if I need to work with VS2003. They are going to patch it eventually, aren't they?

VS 2003 will probably not be supported as Microsoft is trying to get everyone to dump .NET 1.1 and go to .NET 2.0. This is bad news for anyone who maintains ASP.NET 1.1 web applications as VS2005 doesn't support it.

At work we still use some 1.1 applications. But I have a feeling they won't be getting vista for a long time...

Darth Wong wrote:I'm getting the distinct feeling that you're going to be seriously disappointed if you're looking forward to a significant gaming performance increase by going from XP to Vista.

I'm not so sure. I'll go from single to dual core, it should be a decent boost for Supreme Commander, which is very CPU heavy.

You mean very 'huge memory leak' heavy, right? My system can handle SupCom just fine until it eats all my memory and crashes. You didn't notice that after an hour even small maps are far slower than when you started, even though there are very few units?

Do you have any examples of SupCom working much better on C2Ds? Everyone I've spoken to has the same slowdown/CTD problems, regardless of their system. Frankly, the idea that shifting some AI processing onto another core is going to significantly increase performance seems dubious - at best it means the AI could be better and eat more processor time, but given the terrible SupCom AI I have a hard time thinking it's a huge performance hit.

Just because a program has a poor-quality AI doesn't mean that said AI might not be compute-intensive. There are all sorts of other calculations that could be offloaded to another core as well (e.g. physics). IIRC, SupCom also has an issue in which it can allocate more than 2GB of address space (it doesn't actually use that much) and that'll cause some issues.

I don't rate parabolic projectiles as a huge CPU hit either, and I don't see any real physics in SupCom. While it doubtless runs better on a C2D, whether anyone would ever notice is another. I think SupCom's other performance problems would overshadow any improvement from AI or physics. I don't know anyone who has used same settings, same hardware and just change number of cores, though. Experiment time!

I wonder if the AI *is* crap but hugely processor intensive? I've seen some turnbased games that can use dual cores to speed the between-turn processing, but RTS's don't seem to have the scope to use huge amounts of grunt on anything but the largest maps. Maybe they're doing something really stupid like AI checks on a per-unit basis or something? They're sure not spending it on adjacency or deciding where to build their defences.

Stark wrote:You mean very 'huge memory leak' heavy, right? My system can handle SupCom just fine until it eats all my memory and crashes.

I can't say I've run into this... I'll have to try a game and monitor memory usage.

I initially thought it was number of units that caused a game to get slower and slower until a crash, but I confirmed the 'small map, few units, long game' performance problem. Apparently, it's made worse if you use the 'shift' waypoint display overlay, for some reason. I haven't worked out a method to test that, but I can start a game, box up the AI in a corner of 5x5 map and go away, and it'll crash in 30-40 minutes. The GPG forums have many others (with far better systems than my AMD64/6600GT/2gb system) who have the same experience.

Can't say I've experienced that, and I've played more than a few hour+ games. It slows down, sure, but (other than a desync error), no crashes.

InnocentBystander wrote:Can't say I've experienced that, and I've played more than a few hour+ games. It slows down, sure, but (other than a desync error), no crashes.

Your system is doubtless better than mine, though. If I take half my RAM out, it crashes far faster, so I don't doubt that better systems would stay up longer. I'll try and get a RAM-usage log for a 5x5 low-pop map.