I purchased a Dell Studio 17 and it came with Vista Home Premium 64 bit on it. This was the way it came from Dell, it does have 4Gb of memory so the 64 bit version is useful.

I wanted to upgrade this to Vista Ultimate. Normally I wipe a new machine and start fresh, but this computer had very little in the way of bloatware so I figured since all the drivers were loaded and working I might as well try the upgrade.

My first attempt was running smoothly until it got to the second to last part and gave me an error saying it could not configure one or more system components.

I thought it might be something special on the laptop, perhaps the fingerprint reader or bluetooth or maybe the WiFi. I decided to go to the Dell support website and upgrade the drivers. I upgrade the BIOS, the fingerprint reader, and the WiFi. As it turned out, upgrading the WiFi was not the right thing to do…

Still the upgrade of Vista would not work. So I tried removing Daemon tools ( a software DVD drive) – no luck.

I finally tried the web (I should have started there). I found some posts on the technet forum that seems to address the issues. So this is what the recommendation was:

Go into Control Panel/Programs/Programs and Features. click on the “Turn Windows Features on or off” link in the left panel.

• Uncheck XPS view under ms .NET framework
• Uncheck Remote Differential Compression
• Uncheck Windows DFS replication Service

After doing this the upgrade worked. I’m not sure why Windows doesn’t know how to do this but I’m just glad it worked. I was only left with one problem. Remember that I upgrade the WiFi card, well Windows could no longer see it. I had to use the driver disk that came with the machine and reinstall the driver for the card.  After that all was good…

I picked up a Dell Inspiron Mini 910 and decided to put Windows 7 on it. This has been done by other people with apparent success. The only difference was that I got the Mini with Ubuntu preinstalled (it’s cheaper that way).

I knew I might run into driver issues but figured if all else failed I would reinstall Ubuntu and be back to where I started. The Mini did come with a driver disk that appeared to have all the XP drivers loaded. They were in self extracting ZIP files.

After running the install for Window 7 I was left with very little in the way of network peripherals working. I tried to load the XP drivers that came on the CD. Extracting the software was not a problem, but they also tried to run a setup utility which did not recognize Windows 7 as a valid OS.

I grabbed an external USB drive and went to my workstation in the hopes of finding some drivers on the Dell site. There I found some new drivers and an update to the BIOS. I loaded all the drivers from the site onto the USB drive and headed  back to my Mini.

First I updated the BIOS since I would have done that anyway. Then I started to load the drivers from the site. After a few I found the wireless driver and it installed….at least part way. It did have some errors but I figured I’d just try to get connected…and it worked!

After getting online it found some newer drivers at the windows update site for the network so I installed them. After that all the network peripherals were found and I was up and running.

After I got everything working I loaded the blue badge application to turn on all the extras for the 6801 build.

So far Windows 7 is running without problems on the Mini although there are still a couple of devices that are unknown.

The Mini came with 1GB of memory and a 16GB SSD. After installing Windows I was left with a little less than 6GB of disk space.

I have since upgrade my memory to 2GB. This was not because the system was running slow, but because a 2GB chip was only $25 - tough to pass that up.  I am also looking into upgrading the SSD. Runcore has a 32, 64, and 128 model out which are supposed to increase performance. They also have mini USB ports on them for easy transfer of disk images. The 32GB model is going for around $120.