Vista RTM upgrade works from Vista RC2 Desktop

I WAS able to update from RC2 to Vista RTM from Vista itself. I tried it for fun and I was surprised that it actually works. It takes more than an hour to finish up but it does the job in the end.

Just for a comparison it takes about twenty-five minutes to install a clean version of Vista RTM on a machine.

It was funny to update the operating system and to be able to use the abilities of Aero glass and flip the Windows all the time. This doesn't speed up the installation process but it certainly makes it more fun.

Flipping windows while installing

The update from RC2 to RTM did take long but all the applications worked. We needed to reinstall the Creative X-FI audio drivers but at the end system works great.

That is, it was all great until we tried to use the recommend update and installed two Nvidia chipset updates. Oh boy, that was a big mistake. After we managed to BSOD Vista RTM for the first time, we lost the support for our USB keys. Simply after the reboot none of them would work on our machine and we could not convince the Vista that it should.

Nforce recommended driver

Nforce recommended driver effect

I can see the future and the fortune cookie tells me I need to reinstall to make it well again. Even at RTM, Vista leaves a bad taste of unfinished and certainly unpolished operating system. If you have dual-boot or two machines you should play with it but no way am I making it my default and primary operating system. It is still too early.

A reader suggested that we should move away from the 32-bit version and so we did. But there is a consequence of going to 64-bit. First of all it is hard to find drivers. We managed to overcome this problem and installed most of our hardware but, after that, the new Battlefield and the bunch of other games didn't want to work. Often, even if you convince the game to run, it runs in 32-bit compatibility mode, which is usually slower than running the same game on the 64-bit OS.

For fun, look at the last picture. Vista in 2006 wants to install the driver primarily from a floppy drive. Has anyone in Microsoft heard about USB keys? We are playing with some graphic scores to show you how the cards perform, we have some ATI scores but not G80 as there is still no driver for it.

Floppy what?

?