My brother and I both recently, over the holidays, attempted to install the final Vista RTM and here is a brief entry on our findings.
My brother’s laptop is a nice higher end laptop from Alienware, it has a desktop class PC processor in it and runs XP better than most desktops.
He started the install, it took a while to go through all the hardware/software compatibility tests, but FINALLY, after about an hour, started the install/upgrade process.
The install completed sucessfully and when it came to boot time, crushed our hopes of getting Vista running on his machine that night… He basically kept getting a BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) due to a bad modem driver loading, even though the laptop’s modem is disabled.
During his install, I started the install, using the same version of Vista on my Toshiba Qosmio, which is also a high end laptop that has a gig of RAM, an nVidia 6600 Video card and decently powerful processor, although not as fast as the Alienware.
My install also went sucessfully, but took about 3.5-4 hours to upgrade XP. It was about 2:30am and I restarted it to boot for the first time…
It was looking promising, no immediate BSoD, but it just stayed at the “sliding bar” loading screen. After entering safe mode, I noticed it kept locking up on the CRCDISK.SYS driver which has to do with the IDE/SATA bus in the machine. Googling it confirmed people were having trouble, but I found no simple solution.
ONE KUDO: Microsoft at least had an OS rollback feature that would restore XP and get rid of any trace of Vista, which I did and am now back on XP.
CONCLUSION: I AM VERY disappointed with Vista and hope others have better luck.