I decided to take the plunge and upgrade from Windows XP 32 bit to Windows Vista Ultimate 64 bit. It's not really an "upgrade". It's actually a brand new install as you can't really "upgrade" from a 32 bit OS to a 64 bit OS.
Windows has a downloadable compatibility tool called the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. You download it, install it, and then run it. This program will scan your system and basically point out your likely hood of being able to upgrade to Vista. Make sure you have all your periphials plugged in too. If there are any issues, the advisor will try and help you resolve them.
My self built rig is at least 4 years old and here are the specs:
Antec Piano Black Computer Case (It's beautiful =)
Thermaltake PurePower 430-Watt Power Supply
Asus K8V SE Deluxe mother board
One of the Athlon 64 bit processors (I forget which one)
1GB of RAM (all this time I thought I had more)
NVidia GeForce 6600 GT Video Card - 128MB, AGP 8X
Net Gear WG111T Wireless Adapter
Maxtor 60GB HDD 7200rpm IDE - primary
Maxtor 320GB HDD 7200 IDE (was a SATA drive, more on that later) - secondary
A Sony DVDRW
A Lite On CDRW
When I first ran the Upgrade Advisor (the UA) I had a Maxtor SATA 320GB HDD as my secondary drive. The UA had an issue with the SATA drivers. This was the only issue that came up for me, nice! Since I also had the equivalent Maxtor HDD as an IDE drive, I just swapped them out and ran the UA again. After that the UA was happy.
Tangent... I bought an external enclosure for the Maxtor SATA 320GB HDD and use it as my "off-site" back up. Do you have a back up plan? It was always my plan to have one as an internal back up and the other as an external back up.
I proceeded to back everything up to the secondary Maxtor and also the off-site back up drive.
I decided to take the plunge, popped in the Vista disk and rebooted my PC. "Hit any key to load from the CD", hit a key and away we went. After reinstalling Win XP several times over the life of this PC I expected this install to kinda suck, so my expectations were LOW.
I was presented with a screen asking where I wanted to install Vista. It recognized my 2nd drive (which is a good thing!) and that was an option. It also showed my primary drive, but with only 28GB available, meaning that 32GB was in use from Win XP and the existing data. I chose my primary drive expecting the install to just overwrite everything on the primary disk.
Surprise! A dialog box popped up saying it will save all that data as something ".old" - OK or CANCEL. Wow, that was nice of Vista. I didn't want that though, I actually WANTED Vista to just overwrite everything. I clicked cancel and looked at my options. Well there is an "Advanced" link that opens up a few more dangerous options which are good to hide from noobs, like "format drive". I chose that and formatted my primary drive and then installed Vista there.
I totally expected to have to sit there and baby sit the install process. Wow! and I mean WOW! That was it. I didn't have to do anything else. It ran throught the install process, rebooted when it needed to and then when it was done I was asked to choose an icon, a user name and password. No EFFIN WAY! So painless.
So the welcome screen pops up after I log in. There are lots of pretty things to look at but it is clear not all the drivers are loaded. I don't have sound and I don't have an internet connection. Let's just say I had already found and put all the drivers I needed on my thumb drive and then loaded all the appriate drivers and everything, so far, is working as expected.
The NetGear WG111T was a challenge and from what I have read online it has been a challenge for many many people, especially for those running Vista 64 bit. I have a solution and will make a separate blog post about this.
I still need to install a whole bunch of software too, but first (after getting internet access) I activated the OS and then did the Windows Update. I'll post more here if I come across any issues.