Frolicking with Vista - 1

Well after waiting roughly 9-10 weeks for my Vista "free" upgrade, which actually cost me £12 handling and shipping :S It finally arrived. A nice new shinny Vista Home Premium - OEM. Now as expected this was an upgrade edition, so as with all older Windows OS' i was expecting to do a clean install and simply provide my XP media to prove i qualified for the upgrade. So after slapping another HDD in so i could triple boot, Dev1, Games and now the new Dev2 which will eventually lead to Dev1 being formatted, I started up the install process, slapped in me key and then was very nicely told that i couldn't clean install a Vista Upgrade it could only be done in an existing OS. Slap in the face number 1. So I then and rather rashly might I add, decide to get rid of me third HDD for now, as it was running off the slave IDE on the Secondary controller anyway and was installed under the cdrom, which took some fiddling. I decided to upgrade Dev1 as it was only reinstalled no more than 2 weeks ago following some tedious AMD X2 upgrade. I started this process fine, loads up, copies files in windows, all looked very pretty. Scheduled reboot so it can uncompress the Vista image and take over your old OS and guess what happens when the OS Setup kicks in. STOP: 0x0000007B Yes thats right a dreaded BSOD. Bugger was the first thing i said, and felt like cussing our mate Bill again. Slap in the face number 2. So here I am pondering what my next move is. Reboot and try it again. Reboots BSOD again. So here's to me hoping i can get the Old OS back as really its not changed anything, so i reboot and choose load previous version of windows. Luckily this then presented me with the usual choose your XP boot and I was happy again. However when ever I reboot now it trys to start installing vista again and if i forget to cancel it I get my loving BSOD. So after waiting for an age my Vista experience has been a bit crap so far. And last night I had another friendly encounter with it. I helped a guy from church setup his new laptop, printer and wireless Internet. Wireless took no more than 15mins. To then find that his brand new printer didn't come with Vista drivers was shocking. HP should be ashamed! So we then spent about 20mins downloading 180Mb Vista drivers off of the HP site. So it all worked fine once we had the drivers but it not shipping with them is, in my opinion, shocking. Any how hopefully tomorrow I will grace these bloglines with more joyful tales of my Vista experience