Vista Upgrade Advisor – Can I Do It??

As a Techie, I see daily how people are still using Windows XP (And older) on their machines. Now there are a few questions at hand when upgrading to a new version of Operating System. Firstly, what is different? Second, where can I get it? These are followed by a long list of other ‘wonders’. The final question that people may ask, if they even ask it, is will it run on my PC? Many people learn the hard way that it actually will not run as expected on their system, after purchasing a copy. Wasted money and thought time isn’t it? Well please enter, Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor. A tool developed by Microsoft, to determine your PC’s compatibility with Windows Vista.

Now me being the nice person that I am, I took the liberty of downloading the components which you will need to run the scan on your PC. Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor, being the main application. To run this, however, you will need .Net Framework 2.0 installed as well as MSXML 6.0. You do not need to download the last two components if you already have them installed.

Download Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor and start the install. At this point you may receive an error stating that the installation cannot continue due to certain missing components. These would be, MSXML6 as well as .Net Framework 2.0. Download and install these if prompted to.

After completing the entire installation (Including .Net Framework and MSXML if required), open the application. The program does a brief check for online updates and then opens up a very welcoming window, the trigger is found here. Click the ‘Start Scan’ button to begin checking your PC’s compatibility. Please do realize that this may take several minutes.

At the end of the scan, providing you are able to run Vista, you will see the following:

 

Suggestions for upgrades will also be listed:

Click the ‘See Details’ button to display further information regarding the warnings:

As seen above, the vido adapter installed in the PC will not support the Aero interface that Microsoft has been gloating about. No matter, you can still run Vista! this is just a suggestion, if you want the full function – this is your upgrade advisor. Makes you wonder, where did they get that name from? 🙂