My experience upgrading Inspiron 6000 to Windows Vista Ultimate

I've seen a few threads around here with questions about this, so I thought I'd recap my experience with this.

First, here's my system specs before upgrading:
1.86 GHz Centrino processor
64 mb ATI graphics card
1 GB RAM
80 GB hard drive
Bluetooth, wifi
WUXGA screen
Operating systems: Windows XP Professional SP2 and Ubuntu 7.10

Physical upgrades made to the system after Windows Vista Installation
Replaced ram with 2 GB
4 GB Extreme III SD card for Readyboost

The Upgrade Process
I recieved a free copy of Windows Vista Business through my school, so I decided to install it on my Inspiron 6000 after reading about other people's experiences with this. The computer ran very slow in comparison with its previous Windows XP performance, but I started to really like Vista after a couple days of use. The processor was being used 50-60% and about 700 mb of ram was used when the system was idling. I really could only run a couple programs at a time before the system would start running really slowly. Videos would not play smoothly in full screen 1920x1200 resolution as it would in Windows XP. However, they ran well at 600x800. The system ran a lot warmer, and the battery life was slashed to about 75% of the battery life I had with Windows XP. When I disabled Vista Aero, system performance improved a bit. All of the hardware including the play/pause/next track buttons worked except for the touchpad's scrolling features.

I upgraded to 2 GB of RAM and added a 4 GB Exreme III SD card for ReadyBoost to try to fix the speed issues. These upgrades made it seem like I upgraded the processor and graphics card, too! The processor would idle at around 20-30 % and the system idled using the same amount of RAM. Videos played well at full-screen resolutions up to 1200x1000 or so. Internet explorer, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Money, Microsoft Project, Vista Aero interface, and MATLAB could be run simultaneously without the massive system slowdown I experienced before. However, the system under Vista with the new hardware never quite performed as well as it did under Windows XP.

Students get software relatively cheap, so I bought a copy of Microsoft Vista Ultimate against the advice of Microsoft's upgrade advisor. Windows Media Center works horribly if the default resolution is set to 1920x1200. However, it runs very smoothly if the default resolution is set to 1200x1000. You can set Windows Media Center to operate in a different resolution than the desktop's operating resolution, so this is no inconvenience. The battery life was never regained, but this wasn't too big of a loss for me considering I can get by with 1.5-2 hours of battery life.

I re-installed Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.10 on separate partitions just in case I wanted to use them. Here's a tip that will save you a lot of time. When Windows Vista is installed on a system, do not change partitions directly from Windows Vista if you are not using the Windows Vista bootloader or you won't be able to boot your system without losing pretty much everything.

Overall, I'm happy with the upgrade. After a bit of trial and error, the system is running smoothly with all of the glory of Windows Vista Ultimate. I hope this helps you out

 

I never tried XP on my Vostro 1500 and I am wondering if it's worth a shot. I like Vista too much and it's a difficult decision. )

On the other hand, Vista runs great on my laptop. Don't know what to say about yours.