Well pretty good, at least.
Published on January 30, 2007 By UBoB In Personal Computing
Received it this morning at 9:20 from Amazon. Installed it immediately with some hitches, but now all is fine.
Let me start by saying I purchased a full version of Ultimate, 2 full versions of Home Premium and 1 Upgrade version of Ultimate. The full versions installed without any notable incidents. The Upgrade version was a bit fussy. Not only do you need to have XP installed on the machine you are upgrading but you must also start the installation from inside Windows XP. There you are given the choice of upgrading of doing a clean installation.

A small hitch with my ATI Radeon X1600 video card in one of my systems was quickly fixed by downloading and installing the latest (01/28/07) driver from AMD/ATI site.

Now, all systems are go. It's only day one, so there still may be small problems popping up as I go, but I don't really foresee any since I ran both betas, both RC's and the RTM on all my systems over the last year or so.

So far, so good.

Comments
on Jan 31, 2007
I installed the Vista Ultimate upgrade and so far it’s been about like it was going from 98 to XP. No drivers for my Epson 1600 SU scanner or R800 printer yet. I ordered a new HD that’s large enough for another partition so I can dull boot XP for now because I need my printer and scanner.

I have a gig of memory but Vista’s only leaving me around 400mb and I thought that was going to be a problem for Gaming and photshop but both seem to perform the same as in XP. I have a 7600 GT nvidia card and desktop performance is faster than it was in XP. I assume that’s because the desktop is now hardware accelerated, but whatever the case, it runs all the Aero features quite smoothly.

Programs seem to take twice as long to install than in XP but all in all I like it very much. I really like the new search features. Eventually I’ll need more memory and I’ll have to decide whether to pay 250 for 2 gigs of outdated pc 3200 or spend 1600 for a whole new computer.


on Jan 31, 2007
A little more info about my installations.

The full versions of Home Premium were actually 2 extra licenses I puchased using the Windows Vista Family Discount, Link , Using my Ultimate edition to qualify for the two extra licenses.

So I paid $499.00 CDN for Vista Ultimate Full Edition plus $59.99 CDN each for the two Home Premium Edition licenses. Total cost to upgrade 3 of my 4 computers was 618.98. If I had to buy all three licenses at full price it would have set me back $1097.00 CDN (based on Amazon.ca prices for Vista Ultimate, $499.00 CDN and Home Premium, $299.00 CDN) I had a savings of $478.02 CDN.

The Vista Ultimate Upgrade version that I purchases for my 4th computer cost $299.99 CDN.



Other Info:

For those looking to move to Vista but are unsure of their systems ability to handle the upgrade here are some of the specs on my 4 computers, all running their versions of Vista without any problems. These may give you an idea of what is required.

Main Computer:

Motherboard: ASUS P5B Premium Vista Edition
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
Video: ATI Radeon X1900 GT
TV Tuner: ATI Theater 650 Pro
Sound: Creative X-Fi Elite Pro

Second Computer:

Motherboard: ASUS P5B-E Plus
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6400
Video: ATI Radeon X1600 Pro
Sound: Generic

Media Center Computer:

Motherboard: ASUS P5WD2
CPU: Intel Pentium D 950
Video: ATI Radeon X1600 Pro
TV Tuner: ATI Theater 550 Pro
Sound: Creative X-Fi Xtreme Music

Media Center Computer #2

Motherboard: ASUS P5LD2-VM
CPU: Intel Pentium D 940
Video: Onboard
TV Tuner: ATI Theater 550 Pro
Sound: Onboard