vista and my new old laptop

I bought an excellent hp pavillion from ebay. When it arrived I did the
hp recovery thing to put it back to an as-new state with a clean install
of vista. Then it needed windows update. The update process has been a
total mess and has not completed. from the beginning there were updates
which wouldn't download, updates which don't install, and this morning I
find after 8hrs the screen still says 'Installing 1 of 38 do not power
off' (yeah?).

I have always used xp after one previous (not good) experience of vista.
So I am thinking I have four options.

1. Turn off updates and use the laptop. Do they matter?
2. Restore to as-new again and try again.
3. I am downloading a disk of Vista with SP2. Could wipe the HDD and try
that.
4. Downgrade to XP. I would love to do that but I don't know if I will
find all the drivers.

This is a HP pavillion dv9500
http://gdgt.com/hp/pavilion/dv9500/specs/

Any thoughts from the more experienced?

Tim W

 

On 26/02/2013 08:26, Tim W wrote:
[...]

That page is giving the wrong ram figure. Maybe this one is right
http://laptopspecification.blogspot.co.uk/2008/02/hp-pavilion-dv9500-entertainment.html

Tim W

 

Never Mind. I took a deep breath and reformatted the Hard Drive.

Tried XP first. A lot of missing drivers and very little info on the HP
site. Getting even most of the hardware working ooked like a long quest
with no certainty of success at the end. Reformatted again.

Put in my pirate disk and used the product key on the underside of the
laptop. Vista looked a lot more attractive without the vast amounts of
junk that HP had included. Turned off updates, got AVG going fine, got
the HP Scan-for-driver-updates thing off their site and it seemed to
work fine. Turned on updates and to my great suprise it all worked
without a hitch. Excellent. I might even get to like this OS.

How did HP manage to balls it up so, you have to ask? and why do I need
a pirated copy of Vista when I have a legitimate license? The world is a
strange place.

BTW does anybody read this group?

Tim W

 

I see.