Eric Cosky

I recently upgraded my main PC to Vista Ultimate and decided to take advantage of the family upgrade special, where you can buy two Vista Home Premium licenses for other PCs in the house. One of them is my laptop, a Toshiba Tecra M4. I have enjoyed Vista enough on my desktop that I thought it would be worth updating the laptop for the $50 it costs as part of the family upgrade special. The file sync features alone made it worth considering for me, but there are a lot of neat things about Vista that I was looking forward to also.

Disclaimer: This is just my experience of the upgrade process and not intended to serve as instructions for anything.

I was very concerned about upgrading and having it fail, so I did some homework. First, I ran the Vista Upgrade Advisor which is a surprisingly thorough tool that mostly let me know I had to update the BIOS to work with Vista. I also made a backup of my entire disk image using g4u which is handy for this because I was able to boot off a CD and simply upload the entire hard drive to an FTP server I set up on my LAN. Took a while, but I was paranoid that Vista wouldn't work as part of a "clean" install for some unexpected reason and wanted to be sure to just restore it back to what it was before.

After the backup, I updated the BIOS as the upgrade advisor indicated was necessary. Then I proceeded to install the Vista upgrade by booting the CD. Since I wanted a clean install, I did the workaround shown here which, while time consuming due to the second install, does in fact work. Follow the link for details. Just to make sure the process wouldn't be interrupted by some update, I waited to connect the LAN to the laptop until Vista was completely installed and upgraded. I was then able to activate the license and it was all set. In the process of upgrading, I also got rid of that 4gig partition that was previously holding some kind of Toshiba backup data. Since I only have a 40gig drive, this was a free boost in storage capacity. I had been bumping into space problems for a while, and getting 4 more gigs certainly doesn't hurt.

At this point the laptop needed some drivers. Bluetooth mouse, touchpad, etc, did not work yet. Toshiba has 21 files on their website and I originally installed all of them and was quite frankly disappointed by how crappy the software was and managed to uninstall most of them and still retain complete functionality of the laptop. The result is a laptop that is free of all the bloat they put on there when I first bought the machine, which is a nice improvement. Finally, I can say goodbye to the AOL install that WOULD NOT INSTALL. Toshiba really should just eliminate most of the "value added" apps they put on there, imho, they are in my opinion un-user-friendly for the most part and don't really add any value. Value would be a clean, fast system with any added software being added ONLY after making a convincing case that the operating system doesn't already do what this new software tries to do.

The only things I had to install to have full functionality of this tablet PC are:

• ALPS Touch Pad Driver
• Audio driver
• Bluetooth Stack
• CD/DVD Drive Acoustic Silencer
• NVidia drivers
• TOSHIBA Tablet PC Extension
• Intel WiFi

I may be missing out on something by not having the other things installed, but as far as I can tell, I'm not. The ones I uninstalled were really not worth installing. For example, the function keys to adjust display brightness, while convenient, is now EXTREMELY laggy and slow to respond - on the order of 4 to 5 seconds. Just to adjust the brightness. And if it's installed, the control panel for this is a permanent resident at the top of the screen which is highly annoying. Slow, and in the way, all the time. It had to go. I now set brightness controls via the power plan control down in the toolbar which as it turns out is perfectly adequate for the job of adjusting power settings on demand. And it's not laggy.

The modem software is of questionable value in the first place since I never use a POTS modem these days. The Toshiba driver was SEVERAL YEARS OLD, looked terrible, and didn't appear to do anything more than the standard windows driver would, had I needed it. Note that since I didn't need it anyways, I don't know if the laptop modem will work without it. I suspect it would, but I don't know.

The Toshiba Assist might be of use to someone who isn't capable of upgrading a PC's operating system, but had no value to me so I unloaded that also.

There was something in there called "Extended Tiles", whatever that was. I could find no documentation for it, or any explanation of what it was or what I would be missing out on. So far I haven't noticed anything missing.

There are some things for "TPM" which I think is for "trusted platform module", which might be of use to some folks, but not me. So I uninstalled it.

In the end, my machine is now faster due to no longer constantly running a bunch of bizarro (== hard to use, laggy, old) software that is designed to do essentially the same thing the OS already does, and does better. At least, that's my perspective. The laptop is in much better shape now that I upgraded it. In case you were wondering, the Tablet PC functionality of pen recognition, special login keypad, all that stuff is present and nicely improved.

The only down side that I can tell is that my OneNote 2003 won't install under Vista. The installer just fails with no useful error. There may be other compatibility problems I haven't seen yet, but so far I'm running Office Pro and a variety of developer tools with no problem. I'll miss OneNote, I may have to buy the new version (is there an upgrade?) One thing to keep in mind if you do this upgrade, you will probably want to archive your special toshiba apps folder somewhere because if you install the way I did you will have to get them from older backups.

Hope this helps someone trying to do the same thing, I was very hesitant to do this experiment but now that it's done I am glad I did it.