installing vista ultimate on notebook that has xp pro

I got a replacement xps m1730 with xp pro installed on it, I installed vista ulitmate on it and had all sorts of problems with the system hanging, freezing, the dvd drive not working correctly, I downloaded all the vista drivers etc. but still had endless issues, after talking with dell tech support he told me if I kept vista on the system they wouldn't give me any technical support for the operating system. So I reinstalled xp pro the system is working fine now, is there something that I missed when installing vista? Thanks for any suggestions.

 

Well, considering we don't know what steps you did to install it... we can only guess. Perhaps you didn't partition enough space for it? Vista requires a larger partition on your HD compared to XP, if you don't give it enough... it is likely to fail. If you can be more descriptive in what you did, it would help narrow things down a lot.

 

Where did you get your copy of vista from? Did you install service pack 1 on it?

 

Oh yeah, go ahead, blame it all on SP1... jk.

 

I have a 120gb hdd the partition that I put it on was 75gb, I purchased a full version of vista ultimate from a computer store last year. I downloaded all the dell drivers for vista from the dell website. I did all the updates for vista so I guess it would have been the service pack 1 that was also updated. Hopefully this is enough information. The notebook is XPS M1730, 120gb hdd, 2gb memory, 8700GT video card with SLi, 2.4ghz cpu.

 

Don't update Vista to SP1 and see if you encounter the same problems. There have been reports that SP1 has caused crashes when updating to it.

 

ok I will reinstall vista but not install sp1. Is there anything else I need to do before I do the fresh install? Thanks for your help.