Upgrade HP Vista Home Image to Ultimate?

[Me]

I'm buying a new HP PC and would like the 32-bit version of Ultimate.
Normally, I re-image my new PCs, but am hesitant to do that now due to
potential difficulty locating Vista drivers. HP offers 32-bit Ultimate on
very few PCs now.

I have a legal, unused license for Vista Ultimate and am thinking of buying
the PC with 32-bit Home and running my retail 32-bit Ultimate in upgrade
mode. I almost never run upgrades, but am considering it now.

How do you think the retail upgrade will run against the HP image?

 

[Bruce Wheelock]

I'm buying a new HP PC and would like the 32-bit version of Ultimate.
Normally, I re-image my new PCs, but am hesitant to do that now due to
potential difficulty locating Vista drivers. HP offers 32-bit Ultimate on
very few PCs now.

I have a legal, unused license for Vista Ultimate and am thinking of
buying the PC with 32-bit Home and running my retail 32-bit Ultimate in
upgrade mode. I almost never run upgrades, but am considering it now.

How do you think the retail upgrade will run against the HP image?

I just took delivery of a brand-new HP Pavilion Tablet PC, which also had
Vista Home installed. I have a full (not upgrade) copy of Vista Ultimate;
for whatever reason, the installation process would not perform an upgrade
from Home to Ultimate. So I did a clean install. There were a few devices
not recognized after the install was complete. I had absolutely no problem
locating all the needed drivers on the HP website, and no problem installing
them. I also found and downloaded all the useful HP utilities that had been
installed on the computer. It was a snap.

Note that I cannot predict a similar outcome for any other HP computer
model. You could check the HP website for the necessary Vista drivers before
installing Ultimate. In fact, you could check for them before making the
decision to purchase.

/Bruce/

 

[LVTravel]

I'm buying a new HP PC and would like the 32-bit version of Ultimate.
Normally, I re-image my new PCs, but am hesitant to do that now due to
potential difficulty locating Vista drivers. HP offers 32-bit Ultimate on
very few PCs now.

I have a legal, unused license for Vista Ultimate and am thinking of
buying the PC with 32-bit Home and running my retail 32-bit Ultimate in
upgrade mode. I almost never run upgrades, but am considering it now.

How do you think the retail upgrade will run against the HP image?

I upgraded a Vista Home Premium to Ultimate on an HP Pavilion dv6700 with
absolutely no problems. My Ultimate is a retail upgrade install version.