Free Vista Upgrade Shipping Date

So, my understanding is that the free upgrades to Vista will ship according to the order they were received. I think I got mine out pretty early and had my proof of purchase approved around mid-December. Has anyone gotten word about when their upgrade would ship? I hope soon but can't hold my breath. What is the latest?

 

From what I hear, it'll be between March and May.

Don't expect them to be out as soon as Vista comes out.

 

Don't hold your breath.

Vista is decent, but many drivers are still unavailable as companies struggle to push out Vista-compatible utilities for their notebooks. I'm an MSDN member, so I've had access to Vista for a few weeks now. My advice with Vista is the same as my advice with XP was: wait until SP1 to upgrade. When you do decide to take the plunge, do a clean install instead of an upgrade.

 

Absolutely. Nothing better than being there on launch day with rushed, buggy drivers and 10,000 different flaws. Even waiting a few months until your machine/part manufacturers have some time to update their driver sets and for MS to iron out some kinks will yield a better experience. It took a year for SP1 if memory serves, hopefully with Vista MS will have critical hotfixes and patches released on a regular basis right from the start as they NOW do with XP.

 

Also, there are some who are saying that the increased strain that Aero Glass puts on the GPU is causing laptops to burn through their batteries quicker. I haven't personally tested that myself, so I can't really comment. I'm just throwing it out there.

 

Members here already have proven the battery life to be the same as on XP.

 

If true that sucks for prople who use there laptops for games and not plugged in

 

Gaming will obviously drain the system regardless of whether you're using XP or Vista. It produces heavy loads on all the major components of a machine: CPU, GPU, RAM, HD, etc.

 

If you're gaming the interface is not visible anyway - so that won't have any further effect on battery life.

 

I wonder if the Vista upgrade will be an "HP" upgrade, complete with all the lame software and memory eating updates/background programs. I think it should be a clean Vista upgrade but I wouldn't put it past the individual pc manufacturers to do what they can before actually shipping it. There was another thread in this forum that claimed Vista had already been shipped to him via the HP upgrade. Apparently when they checked the status of their upgrade it said, "item shipped". I wonder?

 

Well, it's being shipped from Microsoft, so I think it'll probably be a 'clean' upgrade.

But the upgrade could have bloatware built into the disk.