Windows Vista Update

Alienware Area51 m7700 Vista Install

by Phil
(UK)

It took a long while before i felt happy enough to upgrade my laptop with a clean installation of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition.

After doing some research online to see what drivers were available and which drivers i would need to complete the job, by trawling through 100's (no exaggeration) of pages searched for on Google I came across various stories of people who had attempted this themselves and succeeded. This put my mind at rest that it was possible to upgrade to windows Vista, despite the hardware compatibility report that i got from the program which was saying that a few of my components wouldn't work.

A key piece of information that I'll offer is to just find out the manufacturers and if possible model numbers of each device in your computer, i.e Wireless, Sound, Graphics. I know some were harder to find than others such as the wistron NeWeb Wireless Card. but for these i found that generic drivers from other wireless devices could work in place of the original ones & had greater compatibility with Windows Vista.

I also had to find drivers for my RAID setup which was easy enough if you are prepared to search hard enough.

I personally still don't know why there isn't any support out there for people wanting to upgrade from XP to Vista on Alienware laptops!!

If you are planning to upgrade, Good luck! it should be simple enough once you find all the drivers that you could possibly need (more is better than less) PS have another computer to check the internet for drivers too just in case