vista question....

I am purchasing an alienware area-51 m7700 laptop with windows xp pro. I was thinking of upgrading it to vista, but I have the following question.

Will you be able to purchase windows vista upgrade +sp1 in the same package?
I mean, if you have xp and you want to upgrade to vista, can u get a dvd that has vista and the new service pack? Also, when I upgrade, as I am getting it refurbished, do I need to know any information about the current o/s?

 

Yes, but it's not available yet. SP1 hasn't been released to the public yet. It's slated for a mid-March release and soon thereafter Vista disks with SP1 slipstreamed should be available for purchase.

 

well, it's been released to me, as I am a member of the microsoft partner program

I just don't want to download a huge file like that..

 

Do a clean install of Vista, don't 'upgrade'. SP1 will come down through automatic updates when it's finalized.

 

Yes, MSDN users get SP1 before the rest of us. The rest of us (aka public) will get it via Windows Update mid-march

 

That's another option.

 

thanks i'm gonna wait until vista+sp1 comes out, as It would probably be faster..

 

Alienware went for XP for better gaming. Why spoil it by installing Vista? According to reviews games are slower on Vista since it's not the native system they were written to.

 

The gap between Vista and XP is pretty small, especially with all the new updates. XP might still, in absolute terms, be better, but the difference is small. I wouldn't make that a deciding factor between the two anymore.

 

I got an m7700 with Vista pre-installed about half a year ago. Vista is running fine except for the shut down issues I had a few month ago. Currently it runs very nice without any hick-ups whatsoever (after several Vista upgrades were installed).
Just yesterday the SP1 popped up on my windows updater, but I'm hesitating to install it. Someone once told me that the m7700 was never designed to run Vista, therefore strange things are to be expected (such as the shut down issue I had).
Has anyone with an m7700 installed the SP1 yet and did it make a difference? If not, I'm just going to wait for a while longer.

Thanks for any feed back...