Yaztromo's Journal: Vista Experiment, Stage 1: Vista Upgrade Advisor

Okay, so it took me a bit longer than I had expected, but I got home a bit early today, my SO isn't home (SO? WTF? Yeah -- I'm saving that for another journal entry one of these days. Sorry gang!), so I decided to sit down and get the Vista install rolling.

I popped in the DVD, and the first thing it prompted me to do is to check and see if my system is Vista compatible. So I started it up, only to discover than instead of starting the upgrade advisor as I had expected, it started Firefox instead so I could download the advisor. There are nearly 2GB of free space on the Vista Business Edition DVD -- why couldn't they put the program on the disc itself?

Anyhow, a minor PITA, but not worth complaining about too much. I'm more interested in the results. So after running for 10 minutes or so (WTF was it doing???), the results have popped up. I haven't read them yet (I figured I'd get this journal entry started), so I'm interested to see what it has to say.

System Requirements

• Before you upgrade to Windows Vista, there are some system issues you need to address on this computer (2).
• Some system issues might prevent you from using all of the features in this edition of Windows Vista (1).

Devices

We recommend you review your device issues (1).

Programs

We recommend you review your program issues

Hmmm. Sounds a bit ominous. Let's see what the issues are:

• CPU: The upgrade advisor recommends a minimum 800Mhz CPU.
• RAM: The upgrade advisor recommends a minimum 512MB of RAM
• Free hard disk space: I can't upgrade from XP, because the boot drive is only 9.1GB, with only 3.8GB free, and Vista requires 15GB (15GB!!!). It does say I can install to drive G:, mind you, which has 40GB of free space.
• Video Card: It won't run Aero. I wasn't expecting it would.

So, Vista Upgrade Advisor basically recommends I need a whole new system. Let's see what else it says:

• ATI 3D Rage Pro AGP 2x: Not supported.
• Jungo WinDriver: Not supported. I'm not sure what this is, but I think it was installed as part of the Iomega parallel Zip-100 drivers I installed, which...
• Iomega Legacy Parallel Port Drive ...is also not supported!
• Macronix-based Ethernet Adapter: Not supported.
• Sound Blaster 16: Not supported.

What on this system is supported?

• Intel Master IDE Controller
• Intel PCI to USB Universal Host Controller
• LSI Logic Device (my UW-SCSI adapter)

So, looking at all of this, my CPU, RAM, video card, ethernet adapter, audio card, and old Zip drive aren't supported. I don't care about the Zip drive (I hooked it up to see if it still works), but it's hard to run a system with no video card or ethernet card. On the bright side, if all I wanted to do was run SCSI and USB devices apparently I'm golden (with the problem of CPU and RAM being insufficient, mind you).

Okay, so this looks like a bust, and perhaps an end to the experiment. But let's look at the rest anyhow:
Programs:

• J2SE Runtime v1.5 may have minor compatibility problems after the upgrade,
• Windows Messenger may have minor compatibility problems after the upgrade (huh?)

So, there it is. The experiment might just die right here. I might try to see if I can image the XP drive somehow and try the installation anyways, but the advice from the Vista Upgrade Advisor certainly isn't all that rosy. Not that I was expecting great things to start with, but as this system does run XXP, I figured it should also run Vista with all of the extra video eye-candy turned off. This system runs XP and Ubuntu just fine (well, it installs and runs Ubuntu fine if I give up one of my drives -- the installer doesn't like the fact that I have both SCSI and IDE drives in it).

Fortunately, my computing life doesn't depend on Windows, and doesn't depend on this machine. So for now it will stay an XP machine for those times when I need to do Atmel microcontroller development, and I'll be happy doing the rest of my work on the shineyness Mac OS X Tiger (which has had those fancy video effects and GPU-offload features for more than 3 years now).

Yaz.

Apple's big chance

[nizo]

They should offer a rebate on a new mac if you give them a copy of Vista :-) I can only imagine how many people will go to upgrade their fairly new machine, and get dumped on their butts by the requirements.