Clean Installing Vista (separate partition) on an Latitude D820 - my experience

I received my Vista upgrade DVD's in the mail and decided to install them on a separate partition on my Dell Latitude D820. I'm not quite ready to leave XP for good but wanted to give Vista a whirl to see how it would perform.

My specs:
Dell Latitude D820
Intel® Core™ 2 Duo T7200 (2.00GHz)
15.4 inch Wide Screen WSXGA+ LCD Panel
1.0GB, DDR2-667 SDRAM, 1 DIMM
512MB NVIDIA® Quadro NVS 120M TurboCache™
160GB Hard Drive, 9.5MM, 5400RPM

My HDD only had the initial partion from Dell on it. The package I purchased came with the XP recovery CDs so there was no recovery partition and this model does not have any of the other media partitions found on the consumer models.

There are many commercial partition tools available, such as Norton PartitionMagic, Acronis Disk Director, etc. I don't own any of those and didn't want to pay for something, so I searched for another solution and found the Gparted partition editor, a free partition editor that actually runs on a linux distro. You burn the iso file to a CD and boot from CD to change the partition settings.

Since I only had one partition, I reduced the size of it by ~20GB and created a new partition of 20GB. Most everything I read recommended at least 10GB for a Vista partition. If you have a Dell model that has other partitions, you should check out other resources as to how to repartition these without disrupting the dell hidden partitions.

Once the partition was created, I rebooted into XP and inserted the Windows Vista upgrade disk that came from Dell. Dell ships two discs, a Windows Vista upgrade assistant DVD, and the actual Vista upgrade disc. Since I was doing a clean install, I didn't run the upgrade assistant disc, since it's main purpose is to upgrade existing drivers, which wouldn't be necessary on a clean Vista install. Instead, I installed the Dell specific drivers later - see below.

One note - my BIOS had already been upgraded to A05 from A04 through the Dell assistant program, but even if doing a clean install, you want to make sure you are running the most recent BIOS available from Dell's support site.

After the Vista DVD boots up, I went through the install and chose to install on another partition (there is info here that explains this in more detail). Vista installer went about its business. One of the things that was interesting to me was that it requires very little input once going - and it tells you that too. My computer restarted several times as the installer continued. I didn't track it exactly, but it took about 15-20 mins for the whole install to complete. Faster than I expected, and seemingly faster than doing a clean install of XP.

The Vista installer automatically detects XP installed on the other partition and sets up the boot loader appropriately. So when the computer restarted for the last time, there were two boot options, Vista or a previous Windows installation.

Vista takes a bit to load the first time, but subsequent boots took significantly less time. Right off the bat, I noticed that I needed to upgrade some drivers. I inserted the Upgrade assistant and attempted to run it in Vista directly. It didn't work. It started up as if it was going to work, but wouldn't load. So, off to search the disk for drivers. This disc is a generic one and it contains every single driver for any dell model, including a lot of stuff I didn't need. I picked out the ones I could find and installed them.

Vista out of the box handles most things OK. The touchpad works, but installing the Alps touchpad driver allows more customization. I also installed the Dell quickset (which allows for the wifi catcher, auto display brightness, and the volume status icons to appear), the Sigmatel audio drivers (not sure if this made any difference), the Intel Mobile Chipset drivers (allows for behind the scenes support of specific mobile chipset functions), the nVidia display drivers, and a few other things. I've got things pretty much functionally equal to where they were on XP.

My suggestion for those of you doing a clean install, once the install is complete go to Dell's Driver support page here, don't enter your express tag, but instead select your model from the dropdowns. Once it pulls up, change the OS from XP to Vista 32 or 64 bit. The drivers that show up should all be compatible, and you can pick and choose drivers based on your system configuration.

The results -
Once Vista was booted, it ran a system performance score, and I was please to see that I could take full advantage of Aero and glass effects. I like the window switching options using Windowkey-Tab, fancy.

Speed is snappy and responsive. It slows down a bit at times, but overall for general tasks I did not notice a significant speed hit. I'm curious about ReadyBoost and may go out and get a USB flash memory stick to try it out.

Overall, I find Vista to be nice, but I don't think I'm going to use it full time yet. Once I do, I will probably delete the partition I installed and do a fresh install on the main partition. There's good info on how to uninstall here.

I am probably going to run some performance comparisons at some point, I will post those here when I get around to it.

If you have any other questions, feel free to ask me here.

 

Hi Billhelm,

Thank you so much for your Vista review. I currently own a D820 for work but am only allowed to run XP as of now. I am looking into the near future to purchase another D820 for my home with Vista ultimate. Can you please tell me how your system scores on the (Windows experience Index). I am mostly interested in how the 512MB NVIDIA® Quadro NVS 120M card performed.

Can you post your scores?

Thanks again for the write up, you have made me feel more at ease.

Jeff

 

Clean Installing Vista (separate partition) on an Latitude D820 - my experience​

I appreciate you that you lot of knowledge about vista. People like you are very benificial for others. i have been using windows vista since last 3 months

 

the upgrade assistance dvd has a password for some of the apps, does anyone know the password?

 

Please do not revive dead threads(6 months or older). Thank you.
Thread closed.