Anytime Upgrade it is not
Heather’s company bought a new laptop for its favorite employee (i.e. Heather 
). Since it is all but impossible to find a laptop at a store with Vista Business, we settled for the option of taking Home Premium and upgrading it via the Windows Vista “Anytime Upgrade” to Vista Ultimate (you can’t go from Home Premium to Business, natch).
So began the ordeal.
When Microsoft says “Anytime”, they don’t really mean it. Need it immediately? Don’t bother. What anytime means to Microsoft is that they’ll ship you a disc with a new key, and the average shipping time is 1-3 weeks. WEEKS! In this age of broadband, instant messaging, and high-speed Internet downloads, they ship you a physical disc. Yes, it boggles my mind, too.
The disc arrived yesterday. w00t! When I got home, I popped the disc into the tray and eagerly began what I thought, foolishly, would be a simple process. After the upgrade process futzed around for what seemed like an eternity after I entered in the new key, it presented me with two options: an Upgrade install or a Custom (i.e. clean) install. Great! Except that “Upgrade” was grayed out. The reason? I didn’t have Vista service pack 1 (SP1) installed. Bear in mind that SP1 hadn’t been offered to me via Windows Update yet, and that the disc we received COMES WITH SERVICE PACK 1. Great, so I need to go find the “standalone” installer and install it manually. No sooner had I started the download that Windows Update decided to let me know that it would deign to offer me SP1. #$%*#@!!!
So I downloaded and installed SP1; no minor procedure. After 30 minutes it was finished, so I started the upgrade process again. Interminable minutes ticked by as I waited for the “Upgrade” option. Finally chosen, I figured this would be a fairly quick process. Sweet Caesar’s buttered toast was I wrong.
In my naïvety, I had assumed that the Upgrade would just copy the “missing” bits that Home Premium didn’t have and then flip the registry keys intimating what the version was. I was so wrong. So very, very wrong. First, the files had to be copied from the DVD. Then the files had to be “collected” (I don’t know what it means either, so don’t ask). After that the files had to be “extracted”. Step 4 was “installing” the files, and finally, step 5 was “completing the upgrade”. This process ran over an hour-and-a-half, involved numerous reboots, but fortunately was largely unattended (i.e. I didn’t have to interact with it).
So for those of you keeping score at home, we essentially wrote over the “old” OS with a copy of a very, very similar OS. This wasn’t a “bolt some performance parts onto an engine” type of upgrade; this was “a rip the engine out of the car for no discernible reason, polish it up real nice, and then put it back into the engine bay” full on migration.
The process finished around 00:30 this morning. Something that should have been simple and elegant took over 2 hours and 30 minutes from start to finish. It is no wonder nobody I’ve talked to really cares for Vista. I remember the days where I could install Windows NT 4.0 Server in less than 30 minutes and have it take up less than 200MB. It was clean, solid, and reliable. Windows Vista is the new Windows Millineum Edition (i.e. a bastardized step-child of an operating system that should have spent more time in the oven or have not been released at all). Of course that is just this blogger’s opinion. I used to be quite the Microsoft fanboi, but as it stands now, I turn on my XP machine at home mainly for Quicken, I do most of my desktop work on my Apple Mac Mini, and I’m blogging this from Ubuntu Linux 8.04 on my laptop. It seems like I’m migrating from Microsoft just as quickly as I can – though you can pry my Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000 only from my cold, dead hands.
Fortunately the install of Office 2007 went great. Otherwise I’d have likely thrown Heather’s new laptop through the TV.
All-in-all, I can’t recommend the “Anytime Upgrade” process.