upgrading operating system

[Bill Crawley]

Hi All,

I've just taken delivery of a laptop preinstalled with vista ultimate X86. I have MSDN and have numerous disks and want to kill this operating system and place vista ultimate x64 on instead. I have 2 issues.

Which disk is ultimate, since I have disks that say Enterprise which is obvious, but others that just say Windows Vista X64.

Also I've set the bios to boot from DVD first, but whenever I place any of the vista dvd's in the drive it boots from hard drive, suggesting that these are not bootable DVD's. How can I make a Bootable copy?

[Graham]

You should have the ISO discs in your MSDN package, which you can use to burn bootable cds (four of them, IIRC). Otherwise, I think you just need to run the setup.exe - it'll copy all necessaries to the HD before rebooting.

[dglienna]

You just need to select the x64 Vista disk. The product key that you enter determines the version that gets installed. If you just run the setup dvd, you can format and wipe from there.

Make sure that you can get x64 drivers for everything that you want. Or preferable, just use a new drive for testing purposes.