I recently helped my nephew Peter do a massive overhaul/upgrade of his current PC. We basically rebuilt his PC and the only thing he kept was his recently purchased insane-o vid card and his hard drive. Several hours later we had his new PC up and running–hardware wise at least.
One of the orders of the day–much to my dismay–was to install Windows Vista. I advised him not too, but he got his aunt to get it for him for his birthday and he rationalized his defiance of my advice on DirectX 10. (Truth be told, I sabotaged myself by telling him it was one of the only neat features of Vista, outside of massive memory footprint and overall sluggishness.)
And so our journey began..
I’d like to tell you it didn’t take us in excess of 2 days to get Vista installed. I mean, I’ve been building PCs for years now and I’m a recent grad of Computer Engineering (I know the two aren’t the same, but still..). Piece of cake, right?
Wrong.
To be fair (to myself and Microsoft), I had helped him install Vista on his PC after he got his video card a few short months ago, but after we changed all the hardware from under it, it refused to boot. Which left us with the odd job of installing Vista fresh off an upgrade CD. I knew from previous reading on the web, it would probably only take a call to Microsoft and that they were quite helpful in arranging for you to keep your upgrade in these circumstances, so we marched onward.
First things first..
First things first, stick the CD in the tray, make sure the BIOS is set to boot from CD, and let boot. Okay great, we got the usual install screens, but then Vista says it detects a previous version of Windows installed. It then asks me to boot into it and install Vista from there. Fair enough, except I can’t boot from Vista now! We then chose the option to install Vista and have it verified later. This worked great, full of progress for about 20 minutes, after which, it hung. We then went on to try everything to get it installed. Including just plain trying over and over again. Sometimes we got a little bit further, but it always hung. I thought maybe his Vista CD got too scratched up and it was bad. I burned a copy of an ISO I had (a legit one from a student/Microsoft coop my school runs) and tried the same thing with that. No dice. Being that major OEMs don’t ship install CDs anymore (a ridiculous practice) we couldn’t go back and install his copy of Media Center Edition again and upgrade off that. I went home and hunted for some Win2k or XP cds, but I had no serial keys.
While I was home hunting for software, my nephew was calling Microsoft. The first thing they told him was, take out the memory, you have too much. Too much? Vista basically begs for 4 gigs or more (we had exactly 4, for the record). What do you mean Vista won’t install with 4 gigs. “Preposterous,” I said to my nephew when I got back. “There’s no way. XP installs just fine with 4 gigs!,” I yelled. We eventually even tried just putting two sticks or RAM in to see what happened. Still issues. We continued to try to fiddle with the machine for several more hours before I caved and said, “Let’s just call MS Tech Support and see what they say. We’ll get someone real on the phone this time.”
Before I get started, I do have to say, MS Tech support was very nice (yes, even the team in India we were eventually forwarded too). But again, the first thing we were told was “Too much memory. Take all the sticks out and put one back in.” Upset, I agreed and took everything out except for one stick.
Eventually, Vista installed just fine.
Vista just can’t address 4 Gigs of memory on install!
I told the tech this is a major regression, considering XP installs just fine. The tech then proceeded on as if it were not a bug, but just an issue of our hardware setup. Keep in mind, the Tech did not ask us what our board, or our processor, was until much later in the process. The first thing they said was take all the sticks out. After some bickering, I eventually got the tech to let me in on the little secret that Vista can’t address that much memory on installation and that it is a known issue that was resolved in the SP1 discs. Is it just me, or is this an absolutely horrendous oversight? I’m not going to rehash the standard Vista bashing, but this just goes to show why firms and home users alike are staying away from Vista. The irony is that despite it’s massive delays, Vista was rushed. A lot of this has to do with the fact that they threw away all their work and restarted with a far smaller scope than originally intended for Longhorn, but there plain simply still wasn’t enough time.
XP may be able to install with more ram, but it cannot utilize more than 3gbs @ 32bit or 4gbs @ 64 bit.
Good point, you’re right! But you can also install Windows XP 64-bit edition
Also, I’d like to mention it was 32-bit Vista we were installing. Which may be why the developers weren’t expecting to address that much memory, but XP still would’ve installed just fine.
I just read a pretty cool article (in an old-ish BusinessWeek, I think it was) about blogs and youtube videos that criticize new products and in that way are helping the products get better. Entries like this are good, and if noticed by customer services (and according to that article they DO look), helps make tech better for everyone.
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