Upgrading to Windows Vista home premium is a complete hell

As I sit down to write this post my blood pressure is at the level of mount Everett. I’m making a great effort to not grab this computer and throw it out the window and jump myself after it. But before let me tell you what’s going on.

This weekend I decided to upgrade my home computer from Windows XP PRO to windows Vista Home Premium. After using Windows Vista Business Edition on my laptop for several weeks without mayor issues, I thought upgrading my home computer to vista would not be much of a hassle.

I ran the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor and diagnosed my computer was capable of running windows vista business edition, and promised to make a smooth upgrade from my current setup to vista. Cool, so it rushed to the computer retail store and shell out $ 129.00 plus taxes for Vista Home Premium upgrade.

The upgrade was fairly straight forward; in less than an hour I was installing the network drivers and some other devices that windows did not pick up during installation. But there was one particular thing that I was concerned about, and that was an ATI TV tuner I have to watch TV on my desktop, after downloading a couple of drivers from ATI website for it, my concerns became reality: No support for the TV Tuner. Too old for vista.

OK, this Sunday morning I made another trip to the computer retail store to shell out another $ 129.00 plus taxes for an ATI Wonder HD 650 TV tuner. The first specification I looked for was to be compatible with windows Vista. I installed the PCI Express card and turned on the computer, the device was found, but it did not find the drivers.

Of course I had the CD that came with the tuner, so I popped in the CD and run the installation wizard, at the middle of the installation.. I got the blue screen of death with some errors of Dumping physical memory, I could not read the messages exactly because the computer restarted quickly after.

OK. Probably the drivers on the CD are old, I will download them from the Internet I thought, which I did, and this time the driver installation was fine. I was getting excited; now I needed to setup Windows Media Center to pick the signal from the TV tuner. Cool, media center detected the TV tuner, and I ran the setup wizard fine, but when I tried to test some channels, darkness there and nothing more.

I could actually play some channels, but the images were clogged and choppy. What could be the problem I thought, video card? Is a good one with 256 MB of memory, and after pondering for awhile I decided to reboot the system, just in case something was hanging. At the reboot, I got the error saying that startup was not able to find a good boot partition, and I needed to insert the windows vista installation DVD to repair the installation.

By this time I was loosing my patience, but I decided to insert the DVD and run the repair wizard, after a few minutes it asked me to reboot because windows was fixed and ready to start again. Cool, I restarted, now I got the error “Disk Error press ALT+CONTROL+DELETE to restart.

No, I could not go any longer, I immediately popped in a FDISK CD and boot from it, and nuke off the partition where vista was sitting. I made a surface scan for the hard drive and it came out fine. I found my windows XP CD and started the installation. That’s where I am at right now. Hopefully the TV tuner will be able to run on windows XP.

I will put this Windows Vista home Premium DVD on a contest on this site, hopefully someone can make use of it. I could not.