Let me preface this by saying that I am primarily a Windows user. I like Microsoft software in general. I have made a living off of supporting Microsoft software for a long time. I have no grudge with MS and I hope Vista is successful. It needs to be. That said, my head hurts when I think about upgrading to Vista HomePremiumBusinessUltimateSupersize Edition.
Yesterday I got my first call from an acquaintance that had a botched install. He tried to install Vista Ultimate on a Dell XPS 400. Something went wrong somewhere in the process and the machine would not boot past a Disk.sys error. He spent an hour on the phone with Microsoft. MS suggested that he had a dead hard drive. Bewildered, he called me. I tried to work through it with him, but he was in his car and couldn’t get in front of the machine. There are many possible complications to the problem:
- Inexperienced user
- Upgrade version of the software
- 1,000,000 possible driver/hardware/OS compatibility issues
- USB Keyboard
- Couple other things I forgot
He asked about calling the “Geek Squad.” I thought that could work, though at $250 for a home visit it’s expensive. I’m sure I’ll be hearing from him on Monday.
Vista has been out less than a week and I am already getting calls. I’m trying to figure out if that’s a good thing.
Update: There appears to be something to this Dell-Vista problem. I see that people are finding my post with the search terms below. If anyone has advice, please let me know. Thanks!
| disk.sys vista | 1 |
| dell xps disk.sys windows vista | 1 |
| vista disk,sys error | 1 |
Techno babble from an IT guy named Harry 
My first install went well, though it did take ~ 1.5 hours. I was very skeptical about trying Ultimate, but it has been pretty good so far.
The bigger annoyance is getting the dimmed screen/update question, every 20 seconds while trying to commence with routine setting changes. Im sure any operating system is prone to be buggy on install, hopefully this nmber is less than 1%
I’m also getting a significant number of help requests from home users who have rushed to upgrade.