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Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Vista, XP, Vista 64 update


I think in my last update, I mentioned that the XP hard drive I put in the machine that was running Vista was a smashing success. XP is now up and running with no problems. I ended up having to install Vista from scratch on the machine that was running XP. It was an old nForce 2 motherboard so the hardware was too old to allow an existing Vista installation to recognize all the hardware (for some reason). I guess you can't really expect Microsoft to account for all the insane combinations someone might try in using their software.

When I installed Vista from scratch it came up to the installation menu and said it couldn't find any hard drives on my computer. This was becuase the SATA controller was an older one and during the initial release of Vista, there was no support. In fact, nForce 2 hardware was largely unsupported. I had to manually download the Vista SATA driver and tell the installation where it was (I put it on a USB stick). Vista loaded it and began installing. Vista puts all of your old stuff in a directory called windows.old which is very handy for this kind of thing.

Once I got it all installed and got it hooked up to the Internet, Vista went out and found all of the drivers and several updates (72 in all). About 2 hours later it was running fine with no '!'s in the device manager.

After this success, I decided to go upgrade my Vista 32 box to Vista 64. You can't upgrade. I'm kind of disappointed by this, but from a logical level I have to assume that the upgrade option is turned off because all of the software would have to change. When you installed Tetras, there could have been a 64 bit version of Tetras so you would have to re-install it anyway. There are 64 bit versions of all the drivers. Long story short: I backed out. I'll go from Vista 32 to Vista 64 on another day and let you know how it goes.

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