I did a clean in after an upgrade. It works well. It does it right over the top of the same partition renaming your old stuff to a file called windows.old which you delete after the install is complete.

you can'rt do it from DOS i got a message that because I had already used my product key I had to do the clean install from the desktop. Everything went well and I didn't need any drivers for my model from the Dell website.

 

Good Luck

That's not a clean install. That's an upgrade over Vista. A clean install involves booting to the dvd, wiping the drive by reformatting and installing vista. You will not have Windows.old folder and if you have an upgrade disk, it might not accept activation key. The dvd has all versions of Vista on it. The activation key determines which version is installed. MS has an article about this that has another clean install method: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=930985

It is possible. I also have an E1705. Yesturday I installed the upgrade over XP and had problems all day so I did a fresh install.

 

Here's what I did... Go to Dell downloads and enter in Insprion E1705.

 

The downloads will come up but you will have to change the OS to Vista 32 bit as it will be the OS that came with your Dell (XP).

 

Then the downloads come up I downloaded that all and changed the name to what they actually are

(ex. R1056788 to Chipset Driver). I burned them all to a CD.

 

Then I inserted the Vista disk, press F12 begin install, when you see the partition pages I did a new format over the largest partition. Note I had 4 paritions, 1 was 7 mb so I just left it, 1 was 400 mb and is for Media Direct, and one was 368mb which I think is for the video but not sure and the other was 104 GB which I did a new partition on. Then go ahead and install Vista on that new partition. It only took about 20 minutes and not the 1hr plus when you upgrade over XP.

 

After install install all of the drivers first, I don't know if it holds true for Vista but I always install the chipset drivers first on a fresh OS, then install the rest at random.

 

Hope it helps,

 

Dallas

Mary

 

I did boot to the DVD but when I entered my product key it said that it had already been entered and That it had to perform the clean install from the desktop. This was not my Idea but part of Vista's anti piracy I would assume.

There are differant ways to do it I selected the way I did it because for some reason after my upgrade Vista would not allow me to uninstall Creative Audigy and i didn't want to wait for the patch to Roxio to come out. I selected clean install and following the on screen instructions which made me do it from the desktop. And it did remove all of my previos programs/data and put them in the windows.old folder. It seems to me that Vista has more options on this stuff then XP did. Being that I did select Clean install from the disc and the fact I didn't remove my partion because there was no need to do so then maybe according to you a did a sideways clean install. All I know is that my machine is running perfect and I willl never go back to XP. Everything and I mean everything is running better and faster than with XP. In fact the only thing I installed from Dells driver section was quick set.

 

By the way in case it makes a differance i used the retail version of Vista.

 

The only problem I have had is that the Sigmatel drivers don't work for me I am using the Vista HD Audio installed by Vista and I have no sound problems that a lot of people here report having.

 

I seem to sense that you don't think I know what I am doing but I have been at this since the very first home computers have come out.