I wrote the other day about my attempts to upgrade my XP installation to Vista. After trying 4 times & having the upgrade fail for an “unknown reason” each time, I decided that using my clean dual boot installation & re-installing the packages I need to use, was the best way forward. Any older software that won’t run under Vista, will still be in my XP installation.

So, I got all my e-mails transferred over to Outlook under Vista & installed Dreamweaver etc. Things seemed ok, apart from a couple of troublesome e-mail accounts that won’t connect to their server, so I thought I’d give Bit Defender Total Security 2009 a go, as I have a 6 month free offer from PC Advisor. What a nightmare that turned out to be!!!!!

After installing this package, Outlook came to a full stop & I kept having to close it down. I’m not sure whether it was the anti-spam that was crashing Outlook, or just the combination of 2 bloated Microsoft products running together, but I removed Bit Defender & installed the FREE Comodo Internet Security package instead.

However, Outlook is still not running properly now and after 3 days of this, I’ve really had enough! If Microsoft thinks I’ll be going through all this again for Windows 7, they’ve got another think coming!!!!

Spent 4 hours the other day, trying to upgrade my PC from XP to Vista! I already have a dual boot system & run XP 99% of the time, but as I have a dual core system, with 4Gb RAM (XP can only use 3 of it) and XP is reaching the end of its support cycle, I thought I’d jump into using Vista full time & keep my XP system as the backup instead. So, being good, I backed up my system and set the Vista upgrade going.

All seemed to be going well…..the upgrade path is supposed to leave all my programs & files intact, which is why it takes so long. In fact, I had to leave it going when I went out that evening! Unfortunately, when I came back there was a “read memory” error at 75% and I had to roll back the whole installation – AAAAGGGHHH!

So, I’m once again back on XP & debating whether to bother again. I ran a memory diagnostic which revealed no memory errors, but as I often get this error message when I shut down Internet Explorer, I’m wondering if it’s an error in XP rather than the Vista upgrade.

I really cannot cope with going through a clean installation followed by rew-installing all my software, so I’m back to the inbetween club for now…..if I feel brave, I may go for the Vista upgrade again – who knows, I may get it done just as Windows 7 comes out!!!!!