Ok, I've teased you enough with my post about Aero. Here's the story...
I found a Compaq SR2150NX at Staples for $250 after rebates and jumped on it. Sorry, but it's way more than that now.
This is a 3.3GHz, 512MB system. It has a 120MB hard drive and a LightScribe DVD burner and came with Vista Home Basic. That'd never do.
I ordered Vista Home Premium upgrade from Academic Superstore for $69.95 and 1GB of RAM from LD Technology for $61.99.
In my usual manner, I put the memory in before I ever powered it up. I used a paper clip to open the DVD drive and inserted the Vista Home Premium DVD and did the initial boot from that. I deleted the boot partition and recreated it. Then I used the technique described by Marc Liron to do a clean install of the upgrade DVD. Worked like a champ.
With the added 1GB of memory, I had 1.5GB total and the on-board video card had 128MB of RAM so I have Aero!
I ordered a 2GB USB drive from ZipZoomfly for $4.95 after rebate thinking it'd do ReadyBoost but it won't. The A-Data folks won't respond to my inquiries but for $5...
I am waiting for Active Virus Shield to release a Vista version and trying to figure what to do about Tivoli Continuous Data Protection which won't release it's Vista version until April.
I installed the Office 2007 that I got at the Microsoft Launch event so I've got both of the new UIs.
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Marc took the instructions down on how to do the clean install with the Vista Upgrade media. I'm sure it's "out there" somewhere else, but thought you might want to know.
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