Vista Upgrade Nightmare
So my free Vista Business Upgrade DVD arrived a few weeks ago, and I thought I would finally take the plunge and upgrade my machine to Vista. I have had a clean install of Vista Business (Technet download) running in a dual-boot configuration with XP for awhile, and it has worked flawlessly, so I wasn't anticipating any problems. When I started the upgrade, I was given a list of incompatibilities, but they were minor and nothing I couldn't live with, so I went ahead with the upgrade.
The upgrade process was long. I'm on a Core 2 Duo E6600 with 4gb of RAM, and the upgrade took about two hours. In comparison, the clean install took about 30 minutes. I know the upgrade is more involved, but that seems like a lot.
Immediately upon completion, I noticed numerous problems. And for the record, my XP installation was a relatively new installation and was rock solid and virus/malware free.
I lost probably close to 1000 fonts. I work for a small sign company and help out with some of the design work. A project I worked on two days ago wouldn't open correctly now because I was missing the fonts. I had them backed up on the network and simply reinstalled them.
iTunes couldn't open because access was denied to the iTunes folder. When I checked the security settings, some random SID had full control, but I only had read access. I reassigned myself full control, and iTunes was able to load.
The audio was garbled. Even though the correct driver was installed on the clean install, the wrong driver was installed during the upgrade. I installed the most current driver manually, and it worked.
Sometimes upon login my entire screen gets stuck in that dim mode like it's asking for permission to do something, but it isn't.
I had a custom tool bar on the task bar with shortcuts to about a dozen network locations. The tool bar is there but none of the shortcuts are visible. I confirmed the tool bar points to the directory with the shortcuts, but they still do not display. This is the least of my concerns, but I haven't fixed this yet.
You know those annoying application warning boxes that give you the option to never display them again? Well those appear to have been reset in every application, so I have been constantly receiving these generic application warnings.
Outlook 2007 lost all (~15) of my tasks.
The absolute worst is that my external internet connection speed is between 1-2 Kbps. I was hoping this was a driver issue, but after installing the new driver, the problem persisted. Accessing intranet websites works normally as does network file access. I disabled the firewall in case that was acting up, but that didn't have any noticeable effect. I thought background downloading of updates might be saturating our T1, but the machine 3 feet away from me is as fast as always. I rebooted into the clean install, and the internet worked fine. I rebooted back into this upgrade, and the internet was still excruciatingly slow. I have not resolved this, and am running out of ideas. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually, but if you have any suggestions, please share.
My IP-based printers were lost while an odd share over the network remained despite displaying that it was unusable due to an incompatible driver. When I went to reinstall the printers, I saw that it saved the IPs of all of the printers in the ports drop-down list, and I was able to simply select the printers from a list and have windows automatically install the drivers. I don't see why these printers couldn't have been retained/installed automatically.
VMWare is missing machines and teams. Some are on the list, some aren't. Some of the ones on the list display a little red "X" when I try to access them because they can't be found. When I try to access some of the machines manually, it says there's a configuration problem and they won't load. Some work fine.
I had a MyName documents and settings folder and a MyName.MyDomain folder for when we went to AD. It appears that my files have been split between the two folders when everything was moved into the new %systemdrive%\users folder. It appears that I am now linked to the old MyName folder and do not have access to the majority of folders in there (iTunes problem).
I get a warning when I load Visual Studio 2005 that states that there are known compatibilities with Vista, and I am taken to a page to download the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 update for Vista. When I try to update VS2005, I get an error that says it can't find the product or this is the wrong update, etc. This is unresolved as well (although for what I do, I didn't see any of the problems on the incompatibility list to be significant)
Well, this is what I noticed after about a half-hour of use. I'll keep you posted on what I find when I actually try to do something
I know a clean install is preferential, but backing-up and reinstalling everything on 20-30 machines would be extremely time consuming. I was completely against it at first, but after experiencing this, it may actually be quicker and run much better.
[edit]
Want an example of how bad my internet connection is? Between typing this and dealing with other work-related tasks over the last 50 minutes, I've now been able to load the side menu, top menu, and first line of text from an MS help article. I've just been letting it load in the background. No refreshes or anything. I'm surprised it hasn't just timed-out.
[edit]
Fixed shortcut tool bar on the task bar. Security permission problems once again.
[edit]
I assigned full-control of my users folder and attempted to replicate those permissions to all child objects, and I received numerous access denied errors. It turns out the SYSTEM account was the owner my files and folders, so I have reclaimed ownership and full-control.
The upgrade process was long. I'm on a Core 2 Duo E6600 with 4gb of RAM, and the upgrade took about two hours. In comparison, the clean install took about 30 minutes. I know the upgrade is more involved, but that seems like a lot.
Immediately upon completion, I noticed numerous problems. And for the record, my XP installation was a relatively new installation and was rock solid and virus/malware free.
I lost probably close to 1000 fonts. I work for a small sign company and help out with some of the design work. A project I worked on two days ago wouldn't open correctly now because I was missing the fonts. I had them backed up on the network and simply reinstalled them.
iTunes couldn't open because access was denied to the iTunes folder. When I checked the security settings, some random SID had full control, but I only had read access. I reassigned myself full control, and iTunes was able to load.
The audio was garbled. Even though the correct driver was installed on the clean install, the wrong driver was installed during the upgrade. I installed the most current driver manually, and it worked.
Sometimes upon login my entire screen gets stuck in that dim mode like it's asking for permission to do something, but it isn't.
I had a custom tool bar on the task bar with shortcuts to about a dozen network locations. The tool bar is there but none of the shortcuts are visible. I confirmed the tool bar points to the directory with the shortcuts, but they still do not display. This is the least of my concerns, but I haven't fixed this yet.
You know those annoying application warning boxes that give you the option to never display them again? Well those appear to have been reset in every application, so I have been constantly receiving these generic application warnings.
Outlook 2007 lost all (~15) of my tasks.
The absolute worst is that my external internet connection speed is between 1-2 Kbps. I was hoping this was a driver issue, but after installing the new driver, the problem persisted. Accessing intranet websites works normally as does network file access. I disabled the firewall in case that was acting up, but that didn't have any noticeable effect. I thought background downloading of updates might be saturating our T1, but the machine 3 feet away from me is as fast as always. I rebooted into the clean install, and the internet worked fine. I rebooted back into this upgrade, and the internet was still excruciatingly slow. I have not resolved this, and am running out of ideas. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually, but if you have any suggestions, please share.
My IP-based printers were lost while an odd share over the network remained despite displaying that it was unusable due to an incompatible driver. When I went to reinstall the printers, I saw that it saved the IPs of all of the printers in the ports drop-down list, and I was able to simply select the printers from a list and have windows automatically install the drivers. I don't see why these printers couldn't have been retained/installed automatically.
VMWare is missing machines and teams. Some are on the list, some aren't. Some of the ones on the list display a little red "X" when I try to access them because they can't be found. When I try to access some of the machines manually, it says there's a configuration problem and they won't load. Some work fine.
I had a MyName documents and settings folder and a MyName.MyDomain folder for when we went to AD. It appears that my files have been split between the two folders when everything was moved into the new %systemdrive%\users folder. It appears that I am now linked to the old MyName folder and do not have access to the majority of folders in there (iTunes problem).
I get a warning when I load Visual Studio 2005 that states that there are known compatibilities with Vista, and I am taken to a page to download the Visual Studio 2005 SP1 update for Vista. When I try to update VS2005, I get an error that says it can't find the product or this is the wrong update, etc. This is unresolved as well (although for what I do, I didn't see any of the problems on the incompatibility list to be significant)
Well, this is what I noticed after about a half-hour of use. I'll keep you posted on what I find when I actually try to do something
I know a clean install is preferential, but backing-up and reinstalling everything on 20-30 machines would be extremely time consuming. I was completely against it at first, but after experiencing this, it may actually be quicker and run much better.
[edit]
Want an example of how bad my internet connection is? Between typing this and dealing with other work-related tasks over the last 50 minutes, I've now been able to load the side menu, top menu, and first line of text from an MS help article. I've just been letting it load in the background. No refreshes or anything. I'm surprised it hasn't just timed-out.
[edit]
Fixed shortcut tool bar on the task bar. Security permission problems once again.
[edit]
I assigned full-control of my users folder and attempted to replicate those permissions to all child objects, and I received numerous access denied errors. It turns out the SYSTEM account was the owner my files and folders, so I have reclaimed ownership and full-control.
Comments
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WanBoy67
Member Posts: 225
That's as bad a story I've heard about an upgrade process. Moral of the story NEVER, EVER, UPGRADE WINDOWS. It does NOT work, EVER. In my experience anyway. Sorry for shouting :PYes we can, yes we can... -
dynamik
Banned Posts: 12,312 ■■■■■■■■■□
I got the internet figured out. I thought the problem was in IE as well, but I only tried a couple of pages, and I guess they just coincidentally loaded slow. I tried it again a little while ago, and it ran fine. Turns out there are problems with Vista's TCP auto-tuning for some apps (i.e. Firefox, which is what I always use).
http://robgarrett.com/cs/blogs/software/archive/2006/12/31/vista-firefox-2-slow-network.aspx
I wouldn't say upgrades never work. I've upgraded every version since 3.1 at one time or another. You can tell they're running a bit slow compared to a clean install or there are a few goofy, minor problems that can easily be corrected. However, nothing has been as horrendous as this.
Now that everything isn't completely broken, I have to admit, Vista is kind of nice lol. -
WanBoy67
Member Posts: 225
I've heard of so many techs do upgrades - then hear that it went arseways afterwards and had to eventually wipe it and start afresh. Which would have been the best thing to do in the first place because you had to spend the time do 2 installs instead of 1. Like I say, just my experience.Yes we can, yes we can...