I decided that it was finally time to move one of my two machines to Vista. My tablet, an Acer TravelMate C300, ended up being the victim. That particular tablet is not officially Vista-compliant, but fellow MVP Robert Sparnaaij told me during the MVP Summit that he had Vista working just fine on this particular model. So I decided to give it a shot…

The Vista Ultimate Upgrade DVD arrived Wednesday and I immediately tried upgrading my tablet. Unfortunately, the upgrade failed several hours into it and my XP got restored. I went once more through the Vista Upgrade Advisor, this time removing everything that was only listed as minor issue. Unfortunately, the upgrade failed once again after several hours with the extremely informative error message: “Windows could not configure one or more system components“. With Google’s help, I figured out that the system component in question was Windows XP’s Internet Information Service (IIS) installed due to Visual Studio 2005 being on the machine. I also found the cryptic setup error log due to Google at C:\$WINDOWS.~BT\Sources\Panther\setuperr.log. The log didn’t help at all, so I removed IIS and tried my luck with the upgrade again. This time, it went through.

Everything seemed to be fine after the upgrade…except Windows Update wasn’t working (error code 80072EFD). I went through the steps suggested in help, disabled my firewall, tried everything in the linked Knowledge Base Article, and eventually gave up and called Microsoft Support. Two calls (each 1.5 - 2 hrs), two days later and two Indian support specialists later, it came down to either installing another Vista upgrade on my current Vista installation, or wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything. I decided to go with formatting, because while MS Support was trying to get Windows Update to work, I had discovered that my Offline Files didn’t get upgraded correctly to Vista: My Documents folder is redirected to a network share on my desktop, which automatically makes all subfolders and files of the My Documents folder available offline. Unfortunately, after the upgrade, only half of my files were actually being kept offline and I found no way to reset the Offline Files setting for that folder and force Vista to recreate it (changing the Documents folder back to a local folder didn’t help, nor did the suggestion by an MS support specialist to boot Vista in safe mode).

As I had gotten an Upgrade edition of Vista, I couldn’t just boot from the DVD and format the hard drive from setup. Instead, after backing up the few things that weren’t already on my desktop, I formatted my hard drive with an XP installation, and then did a customized Upgrade to Vista (clean install, but the current Windows folder gets renamed into Windows.old). 24 hours later, I have a working Vista on my tablet (with working Windows Update) and my Documents folder is kept fully offline as well. My 2 GB of IMAP emails are still downloading and I am probably only 25% done with reinstalling all my programs.

I know one thing for sure: My desktop will not be a straight upgrade from XP to Vista. That means, it’ll probably be running XP for at least another year…

Edit: I am actually impressed now with the Microsoft Support based in India. The manager of the two support technicians just gave me a call to find out how I was doing and how good the support I received was. I spent 20 mins on the phone with him and he promised that if I had any further issues, I could contact him directly and he would get his best technician to help me with them. That is actually very impressive for free consumer support (free within 90 days of the Vista activation).