OEM Home Premium & retail Ultimate

I have a laptop with 64-bit Home Premium. The warranty expires this June. I
want to upgrade to Ultimate. Does Microsoft sell OEM versions of Vista
upgrades on its web site? I assume that I would not have a problem installing
a retail upgrade of Ultimate onto a laptop with the OEM version of Home
Premium. Am I correct in my assumption?

Thank you.
David

 

There is very little value in upgrading from Home Premium to Ultimate
especially as Windows 7 is earmarked for possible release at the end of this
year..

 

I agree. Unless you have a pressing need for a fax app or Bitlocker, I would
definitely wait.

 

Hi David,

The short answer is that yes you can upgrade with a retail version of
Ultimate. Do you need to? Is there something in Ultimate that you need that
makes the price of this upgrade worthwhile?

 

I hadn't thought about that. What versions will be available? What about
drivers? Will Windows 7 use Vista or XP drivers?

 

Well, I want to be able to make policy changes to my laptop & Home Premium
doesn't allow that.

 

Hi, David.

"OEM" and "upgrades" are mutually-exclusive terms. An OEM version is, by
definition, to be installed on a factory-fresh machine, so it can't be used
to upgrade from anything.

And, from your later post:

Windows 7 will need new drivers, which may or may not also work with Vista
or WinXP. Remember that Microsoft writes Windows; hardware manufacturers
write the drivers that make their products work with Windows. Microsoft
works closely with major IHVs (Independent Hardware Vendors) and includes
many available drivers in the Windows package, but the drivers are the
hardware maker's responsibility.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX

Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2009 in Win7 Ultimate x64 7000)

 

Something you can't do with parental controls?

 

Noone knows except the marketing geniuses at MS and they aren't talking.
Uninformed opinion says they'll be very similar to Vista, but that can be
changed pretty much any time up until RTM.

There's very little change to the kernal from Vista to 7, so the drivers ought
to be the same. They definitely won't use XP drivers.

 

FWIW the current Windows 7 betas are often able to use Vista drivers if no
Win7 drivers exist for a device. Despite that, there might be some devices
that will not work unless or until Win7 drivers are written for them. One
way or the other all of my own hardware that works in Vista also works in
Win7. Except for the keyboard and MP3 player most of the hardware is 1-4
years old, with the PC itself designed for XP MCE 2005.

 

Regrettably, not all drivers come from the competent hardware
manufacturers. Many come from Microsoft.

The great Gary Kildall invented operating systems. He was murdered in
1994 by a blow to the head - a great loss.

His concept was to write drivers, drivers and more drivers. Then you
put together a "System" with "Gensys" ( Generate System - also a pun
on "Genesis"), using only those drivers that are needed for the
equipment available. This kept the system (CP/M) small, as was
necessary in the days when memory was expensive.

Today, Microsoft build a huge collection of drivers into their
systems. Unlike CP/M, where every edition was different - a daisy-
wheel driver or a Centronics driver but not both - the system is
cluttered with many things that are not used. Every copy of a "Vista"
with a particular development number, for example, is the same.

But Vista is full of bugs. The 32-bit, the 64-bit and the "Upgrade"
versions are buggy.

So when you buy a Lexmark printer, you get an old Lexmark "Wizard". It
"asks" Vista whether there is a COM1 driver. Vista "says" yes. The
printer is installed for COM1 even on a machine that has only USB.
Modern Lexmark printers also have only USB. So Lexmark and Vista are
incompatible.

The wonderful DVD suite from Cyberlink either crashes or misbehaves.
One one machine I bought, it crashed. I swapped it at the shop for
another, and bought a more modern DVD suite, with "Power Director". If
you cut the end of a film clip, it works. If you cut the beginning,
the video vanishes leaving only the sound.

Cyberlink, in their instructions, have concealed the words "If you
want the program to work correctly, install out own drivers, and do
not use those from Microsoft".

On the Microsoft website, I found 42 different "updates". There are
many, many "updates to make updates possible".

As they are themselves updates, they don't work until AFTER the system
is repaired, and you do not need them. Undeterred, Microsoft write
more and more of these "updates", and publish them untested. That is
why there are 42 of them now.

The White House rejects Vista. They use XP. They know about the bugs.
However, there seems to be some special relationship between Microsoft
and the US government, because they reject Apple, which is stable.

I have traced these intermittent faults through to system level. At
Function 66, subfunction 2, it delivered a file size of MINUS a
billion and a quarter bytes. It was commercial software that works on
other systems.

Vista is therefore fatally flawed.

Avoid upgrading. Switch off the automatic "updates" - they only
corrupt the system.

Charles Douglas Wehner

 

Here is a long URL, showing the Microsoft "updates" for Vista. There
are now 48 of them.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...eriod=&sortCriteria=date&nr=20&DisplayLang=en

I will divide that URL up, so that if it does not all arrive as a
single "string", you can string it together, and rebuild it:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/results.aspx
?freetext=Updates&productID=8D7DD8D7-1CA6-4632-BAEF-E7C0750ED02E
&categoryId=&period=&sortCriteria=date&nr=20&DisplayLang=en

NONE OF THE UPDATES WORK.

Here is the reason:
----------------------------
QUOTE
System Update Readiness Tool for Windows Vista for x64-based systems
(KB947821) [August 2008]

This tool is being offered because an inconsistency was found in the
Windows servicing store which may prevent the successful installation
of future updates, service packs, and software.
10/8/2008
#629

System Update Readiness Tool for Windows Vista (KB947821) [August
2008]

This tool is being offered because an inconsistency was found in the
Windows servicing store which may prevent the successful installation
of future updates, service packs, and software.
10/7/2008
#135
UNQUOTE
----------------------------
That's right. They have discovered that Vista computers have an
"inconsistency" which prevents "Updates" being "configured". Here,
however, they call it "installation".

People download this "Readiness Tool", only to discover that their
system will not install it because it is not "ready".

Notice also, that this is quite a wide-reaching bug. It prevents the
successful installation of service packs and software in addition to
updates.
-----------------------------
QUOTE
Update for Windows Vista for x64-based Systems (KB949939)

Install this update to enable future updates to install successfully
on all editions of Windows Vista.
4/8/2008
#2123

Update for Windows Vista (KB949939)

Install this update to enable future updates to install successfully
on all editions of Windows Vista.
4/8/2008
#407
UNQUOTE
----------------------------

That was a separate attempt to enable "Updates" by means of "Updates"
- like driving a car without fuel to fetch fuel.

Notice also the sloppiness. It says "on all editions of Vista".
However, closer scrutiny shows that these two tools ("Readiness Tool"
and "Update") each comes in two versions. One is for the 32-bit
edition, the other for 64-bit. NEITHER is for "ALL editions of Windows
Vista".

To get SOME performance out of Vista, you first have to confirm that
the problems confessed to by Microsoft exist. You have to take the
computer completely offline, and see if the "automatic update
configuring" takes place. This takes the form of a CRASH. "Anoraks" -
kiddies who like to play with broken computers - show off their
"knowledge" by saying that the behaviour is normal. It is not. A
deliberate updating system will not simply crash out of a program.

Consider a typist. He/she is in the middle of typing a long and
difficult piece. Suddenly, the computer stops working. The text
editor/ desktop publishing program crashes, and the system reboots -
or even switches itself completely off. All typing is lost. This is
not normal.

So if your system does this, TURN OFF THE UPDATES. It may take time to
"wake up" to what you have done. With me, it took five days. But
afterwards the system will be more stable.

When planning to put some program into the computer, do NOT let the
"Installation Wizard" do it. Instead, create a directory. Then go to
the CD with the program, and simply copy the pieces across one by one
until every one of them is in the new directory. Now look for the
piece that is described as an "application". Click on it, and it
should run.

If it does not run, the best thing is to empty that directory again,
and delete it.

However, old, stable programs that I used on Windows 95 did work for
much of the time on Vista after I had manually put them in.

The difference between installation and "putting in" is that various
system registries are altered by the "Installation Wizard". Putting a
program in will not dig deep into the system in this way.

You may be puzzled by the numbers #629 #135 #2123 and #407. These are
the "popularity" of each "Update". People download one. It doesn't
work. They try another. Again it doesn't work. They keep going. On and
on. Yes - "Updates" are very popular.

On the page I showed, the default setting is in order of "popularity".
I have changed it to "by date", so that the most recent, and therefore
perhaps least "popular", but maybe most successful "Updates" are
listed first. There are three screens of these "Updates".

This is the code that does it:
&sortCriteria=date

Do they mean "CRITERION"?
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/criterion

Charles Douglas Wehner

 

The expected arrival of Windows 7 (perhaps called NT 7 in the Internet
"Environment Variables") is greeted with great foreboding.

"Eye of newt and wing of toad, finger of birth-strangled babe, ditch-
delivered by a drab, in the cauldron boil and bubble.

All hail, Windows 7. All hail, Windows 7."

It will be the usual hocus-pocus, with "Upgrades to enable Upgrades".
Science it will not be.

In the early Eighties, I wrote printer drivers, an RS232 driver and a
Centronics driver for a small home computer. Memory was scarce, so I
used each byte to do many things at once. I even worked-in a timeout,
so that it would announce "NOT CONNECTED" after a minute, and return
control to the user. Microsoft had sold their operating system to IBM
under the name PC-DOS. If a typist tried to type before saving to
disk, the machine would hang is no printer was connected. There was no
timeout. That sloppiness continues to this day.

It seems that on XP they used a different system of interrupts. The
usual (I thing also with Cambridge University's "Tripos") is to count
out subroutines, until the "priority" has expired. Then it switches
tasks. On XP it counted out microseconds.

So when time was up, XP would crash out of some printer or scanner
driver. The result was stripes on the scanned image, and alphabet
salad on the printer.

So they introduced special "certificated drivers" whose subroutines
fitted into the allocated time-slot.

After this fiasco, they reverted to subroutine counting on Vista. It
is hard to know what fiasco will arrive with Windows 7.

Charles Douglas Wehner

 

Do you remember "beep of death" in LAN Manager network software? That was
in early nineties, programming for MSFT in Redmond. If a network server
failed to respond, the computer would periodically beep, to let you know it
was still working on it. There was of course no way for the user to regain
control short of Ctrl-Alt-Del.

"Certified".

Earle

"Charles Douglas Wehner" <> escribió en el mensaje
de noticias
news:...

 

I (fortunately) had no dealings with that LAN.

However, "Certified" is a better name for "Certificated Drivers". It
is the programmers who should be certified.

Charles Douglas Wehner