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General discussion

Upgrade: XP Pro SP3 to Vista Ultimate SP1

by lemaech56 Dec 6, 2009 7:30AM PST

Dear Forum,

After 6 months of rock solid stability of my home built Core2 Duo E6600 desktop ( > 3 TB of SATA II HD, high end PCIe x16 Nvidia card, 4 GB of DDR2 RAM (only 3 addressable) , ABIT IP35 MB), I've decided to take the plunge of upgrading to Vista Ultimate SP1. Why not just bypass Vista and go Windows 7 Ultimate? The reasons: a) I purchased Vista Ultimate several months ago; b) General information suggests that things have settled down; c) I really need to expand RAM to > 4 GB and to run in 64-bit mode due to my scientific applications focus.

I welcome advice on:

- Dual booting

- Ensuring that my email (Outlook 2003) will be transferred
successfully. Exporting my address book from Outlook 2003 on my
previous server to my new desktop wasn't success, and I had to
rebuild my address book manually.

- Ensuring that my IE8 favorites will be transferred.

Note that Vista Upgrade Advisor indicated that everything is good to go excepting the need to update the driver for the Sound Blaster X-FI driver.

Thanks for your support.

Discussion is locked

2 Posts

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Then the ONE question.

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Dec 6, 2009 8:14AM PST

Is there a backup? Is there the 2 backup copies of what you can't lose?

Many do this, most are lucky but where is the backup plan?

About 7. Sorry I just kicked a Vista 64 install to the gutter. It grew too ornery and tiresome to use. I used the 7 64 bit upgrade AFTER uninstalling the usual antivirus, firewall, CD/DVD burning apps and a video/fingerpint scanner login feature. After that, the upgrade to 7 went fine. About 5 hours later all is well.

I'd skip Vista.
Bob

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Re: Then the ONE question

by lemaech56 Dec 6, 2009 12:11PM PST

Bob wrote:

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Is there a backup? Is there the 2 backup copies of what you can't lose?

Many do this, most are lucky but where is the backup plan?
---------------

I've backed up C drive to an external USB HD. In addition, I plan to do another backup and export Outlook's and address book, and IE8's favorites to respective files on the USB drive. I don't know what happened with email address book and favorites recovery during my last server build.

Finally, I shall definitely consider skipping Vista and go right to Windows 7. Since I'm currently running XP Pro SP3, is Windows 7 Ultimate overkill? I do a lot of application prototyping at home and like the "built in" encryption features of Vista and Windows 7 Ultimate. However, I am aware that there are several free and freeware codes that do an excellent job on this function.

Thanks for your persistently outstanding advice. I've always done well by following it.

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