I upgraded from Windows XP Professional to Windows Vista Ultimate over the weekend. The upgrade install progressed smoothly. Afterwords, vista would not boot up with the 1 gig ddr ram installed during upgrade. It would nostly lock-up at the "welcome" Vista colour screen, sometimes at the blank screen immediately prior to that, with hard drive activity light on steady.

So I ran Vista with 512 megabytes of DDR ram. Using the Vista experience, hardware evaluator in the control panel always locked the system requiring a reset. Photo gallery would lock-up after one or two colour photos displayed. I installed Windows Ultimate Office 2007 upgrade. Total software cost was over C$1,000.00 with sales taxes. Plus another C$130.00 for 1 Gig DDR memory wih didn't work, plus C$90.00 for 512 meg DDR add on memory which didn't work also.

Some drivers were blocked on boot-up, so I located one and stopped it as a service from the administration of control panel. The other driver was from Sonic Solutions/Roxio, which is supposed to be Vista compatable. Maybe now it is, but my two year old version of Creater 9 is not obviously. No patches available. After uninstalling the entire Creator 9 software, the system would no longer boot, but continually reset itself after the power on self-test bages from the BIOS.

I had to re-install Windows XP Professional then reinstall Windows Vista. I removed the sound card (not supported by Vista comes the message) and used the default one on the mother board. I Installed another LAN card, which was Vista compatable from its list of drivers. The manufactuer's (Link-D) install program did not work with Vista, but did with XP.

Vista is painfully slow to boot up and slow to switch between windows, say from media playback to web browser. increasing buffer may help minimize stalls while switching between windows. This never ocurred with XP and I had 3 windows regularly switching back and forth with no media jerking. Playback of saved media is ok fortunately, not damaged do to underruns of buffer/switching or whatever the heck is wrong. Switching on playback probably will induce hiccups. Not good for half a Gig. of DDR memory installed.

Occasionally boot up still freezes! So I set system performance to favour process instead of programs. This simplifies the colour and GUI minimizing ram used.

I learned that Vista boots up differently than XP. That is obvious. Maybe there are bugs but I cannot use any feature that equires 1 Gig. ram and have to re-install Windows Office Ultimate 2007.

Microsoft may be making other third party software "not compatable" to a degree never before experienced. That is THE Vista experience. I lost all my programs in the registry. They still exist but must be re-installed. Some are 3 or more years old secuirity and media and I fear that Vista may declare them incompatible. Instead of upgrading the manufacturerers' Vista compatable software, I may resign myself to using wat came with Vista. sigh

This is the worst Microsoft OS since Windows 95 which also had boot-up instability, eventually corrected however, and by foar the most expensive.

Gimme not fancy colours but a stable boot-up and user enabled boot-up repair and editing controls, not crystptic dos level boot config stuff that repairs nothing.

I use a clone, 2.0 Ghz. Intel cpu worked fine for years with XP Professional. I installed XP Professional again. This time however Vista's choice of "previous operating system", "Vista" choices are not right. XP, the re-installed one, will not boot, "file corrupt." Nice. sigh

Forget about "restore points" This was never stable enought to create any, nor are these points relevant to the boot level which is prior to the full features availability on the desktop. sigh.

I ran the Vista compatibility wizard and was checked out ok. There is a more detailed tool available, as it can remotely assess pc's on a network, but it requires at least 1 gig of ram and 2.6 Ghz. cpu. Out of luck and out of tools too. sigh. Isn't that a bit excessive in required resources? Software comes on a DVD which my system cannot boot from as a DVD player is not included in the drop down list of boot devices included in my mother board bios. Gee, I gues a three year old system is obsolete already. It appears that I am being pushed into a technical corner here. If original media boot is needed as a backup failsafe option, then a new motherboard that allows DVD players as boot devices is required. Gee what else will be "required" as updates get automatically downloaded by "Windows Update"?

I just checked out Microsoft's own Vista discussion boards. whew, what a learning experience. Dozens of complaints similar to mine are pouring in, server response is sometimes a little slow. Microsoft should shut down the boards due to the bad press they give: Vista is known to be buggy with over 200 fixes to bugs in the Microsoft Knowledge Base so far listed.

Peaople are throwing money at upgrades to no use. It is the OS that is at fault. In my opinion, do not buy Vista (or any other os) until all is bright and happy from the feedback on these boards. That may be as soon as Vista service pack 1 or a very long time. New Drivers? How can drivers cope with buggy OS, new or old? They cannot.

http//windowshelp.microsoft.com/communities/newsgroups

search under "lock-up" in several groups:

installation and setup
performance and maintenance
windows vista general discussion