vnunet.com comment: Yet another tale of Vista upgrade woe

OK, I know that this may not be the first Vista installation story you may have read, but it may add further to the knowledge base of information available to help others make a reasoned decision on whether to go for Vista or not.

I bought a new Lenovo/IBM Thinkpad X60s last year as it was 'Vista Capable', unfortunately just a little early to benefit from the free upgrade to Vista available from many vendors.

So I ran the Microsoft Vista Upgrade Advisor Tool which came up with one major issue - the joys of Symantec Client Security, which had to be completely uninstalled - alongside a few warnings of "minor incompatibilities".

The tool also showed that I could run Ultimate Edition with all the bells and whistles of the Aero interface: 3D, transparency, the lot. Everything looked pretty good for a relatively seamless upgrade.

I went to the Lenovo site, which came up with further advice to uninstall a few pieces of its software, but again, nothing too major.

So, having followed all the instructions (very unusual for me), I put in the Vista DVD and off I went. Just over an hour and a quarter later, I had a machine running Windows Vista.

Aero was there, and all told, it looked pretty good. It looked like the upgrade had gone relatively smoothly. However, then came the problems.

Firstly, internet access just did not work from the Wi-Fi connection. No settings had been carried across to Vista, so I had to remember my WPA settings and so on, but even then, I could not get to any external sites at all.

I could, however, ping internal machines. Finally, by manually putting in DNS entries, I managed to get external access.

Then I found that most of the Lenovo tools did not work. I had to download new software from its site, but no advice was provided as to the order in which things needed to be done.

Even when I had managed to get the automatic updater working, Lenovo's site was still offering me a full range of possible updates, including some that were not Vista compatible.

Eventually, after another three hours or so, I managed to get the laptop to a position where I felt that I had wireless, wired network and 3G connectivity all working, along with the majority of the Lenovo tools working to a greater or lesser degree.