upgrade from premium to ultimate

[jsusana]

My son just got a Dell Studioo 1735 with HOme premium. The computer
exceeds all of the minimum requirements for the college. His college
requires Ultimate and sold us the upgrade disk. Upon inserting the
disk he was given a choice of upgrading or partitioning, but when he
chose upgrade, an error message stated that he could not upgrade. He
clicked on partition. It took a while and several tries to get the
computer to go all of the way through the installation process. I do
not know if he stopped the failed attempts when it was taking so long
or if error messages came up. (he is impatient!).
It eventually went thru the list of the installation procedure, turned
its self off and came back on with the "WINDOWS ERROR RECOVERY" screen-
black with white font. He chose "safe MODE" was able to start it back up
and the Ultimate screen came on.
On the MY COMPUTER screen only 2 drives showed up: the OS and a
recovery drive. the cd drives had disappeared.
We called Dell, but could not understand the techs. MEanwhile he tried
it again and again The internet connection was lost also, so we could
not do an online trouble- shoot. He kept trying to reload, reboot
etc. The recovery file kept growing. THe university IT guy came in
while we were talking to Dell ( one I could understand this time) and
between the two of them, they came up with:
1. system was not recognizing the cd drivers so the cd drivers need to
be reinstalled (HOW? they could not decide)
OR
2. that the system needed to go back to factory settings for Home
premium. (my son did that himself this morning)
AND
3. Dell said that this computer will NEVER be able to run Ultimate,
that we would need to send it back for them to load ultimate- for a
"nominal fee"


Any advice would be helpful. He is operational with home premium, just
not to school standards.
Thanks.

 

[Mick Murphy]

It is a new laptop from Dell.
It should be Vista Home Premium Service Pack 1 installed on it, going by the
date of manufacture!
Click on Start>Right-click on Computer>Left-click Properties>that will show
what version it is.

Ask the University IT guy if the Ultimate Upgrade disk contains Service Pack
1.
If it doesn't contain SP1, that is the reason you can not get it to do an
upgrade.
The Upgrade disk is then classified as an earlier version of vista, which it
is.

 

[Rick Rogers]

Hi jsusana,

I love this:

3. Dell said that this computer will NEVER be able to run Ultimate,
that we would need to send it back for them to load ultimate- for a
"nominal fee"

Um, if it will "never" run it, then how would they be able to load it for a
nominal fee? The fact is, if it runs Home Premium then it can run Ultimate.
The core OS is the same, it's just the feature set that differs.

First, check as Mick has indicated. The university's upgrade disk must be at
the same or higher service pack level than the installation. If SP1 is part
of the preinstall, which it likely is on a new machine, the upgrade disk
must include it as well. Otherwise it could only be used as a clean install.

If the disk is not, then that is likely the source of the majority of the
problems you are encountering, as the retail disk being supplied likely does
not contain the proprietary drivers needed to support the hardware Dell has
used to build the machine. Either an upgrade is necessary, as it will port
over the drivers from the existing installation as part of setup, or drivers
from Dell are necessary to complete the clean installation process.

Oh, and as for your son and impatience, that never mixes well on an OS
installation. Best to have someone else do it.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Chuck]

Then the laptop must have failed windows vista compatibility testing?

Actually, I'd think that the Dell person did not know what he/she was
talking about.

You do need to have the Dell driver package as well the as install media.

I believe that you may be between the proverbial rock and hard place for an
upgrade, due to the SP1 issue.
MSoft may have a solution, and the school IT people should know what it is,
since upgrading to Ultimate is the schools requirement.
Fortunately, I upgraded my HP laptop (New last November) to Ultimate before
SP1. Installing Office was a major problem, in that any leavings from the
"trial version" supplied by HP had to be eliminated before the install would
completely convert everything to the full office version. One pesky problem
was eliminating the "Not for commercial use" statement in the window border
of some office applications. (Left over from the trial version.) Office is
like using a shotgun on the registry when it installs and creates hundreds
of entries.

"Dell said that this computer will NEVER be able to run Ultimate, that we
would need to send it back for them to load ultimate- for a "nominal fee""

 

[jsusana]

Thanks to everyone responding. Mick was correct.The school upgrade did
not include SP1. My son was much more relaxed about the situation last
night after talking to other students with the same problem. The IT
department was going around this morning informing the students that
the school had distributed the inadequate upgrade. By the time they got
back to John, I had already told him about Mick's idea and assured him
that if it was just the disk, the school would make amends. They will
be getting the right upgrades soon. Meanwhile, he has this forum to

 

[Mick Murphy]

Thanks for letting us know.
Cheers.