Install

We had a notebook with no OS installed and the hard drive formatted as NTFS.  This page describes installing Vista on this notebook computer.

 

The notebook model is the Dell Latitude D600.  The D600 has a pentium M;  this has 1.6 MHz pentium M, really not powerful enough for every day vista use, it isn't considered vista ready.  It was likely made around four years ago, but We'll give it a shot because it has a DVD/CD RW drive so it can at least process the DVD. 

 

The first try was quite frustrating, I felt not unlike one of the monkeys in the opening scene of space odyssey 2001.  The notebook kept giving the message "could not find NTLDR, please reboot".  I first addressed this problem by promptly getting pissed off, and screaming "well, try harder!!", then took the far better approach of changing the DVD from the 64 bit to the 32 bit.  But this sudden blip of consciousness did nothing to solve the problem.  Yelling at PC: 1  being mature: 0.  It turned out the hard disk was in the boot order before the CD/DVD drive, so that problem was quickly fixed by simply switching the DVD/CD drive into first in the boot order. 

 

When a PC first boots up it usually gives you a message telling how to get into the BIOS screen.  On the Dell note books, this is usually the "F2" key during the first few secconds of the boot up process.  Generally if you miss it you either have to reboot or let your PC load up in order to shut down and try again.  Once you're in the BIOS screens, theres usually a few pages of setup screens, the one that mattered for this was the seccond page which was all possible boot devices and which order they should be in.  The page that has the boot order also has resonable explanation on how to change the order and availablity of the devices.

 

At that point we decided to reboot and see if it would finaly work and the computer said to press any key to boot from CD it took us a few secconds

but we finally pressed it and the screen was still giving us that message.  It did work on the seccond try though when we made shure to press it quick.

 

The next big thing we saw was the activasion screen.  We were only installing to run it on this notebook for a couple of months, as we have another notebook on back order.  It does'nt make sense to pay 150 to 400 dollars for a PC you'll only own for a couple of months.  Because we don't want to pay so much for a new coppy of Vista, we instead decided to use our current coppy and just deselect the check box for registering Vista, which will automatically give you a trial version which lasts 30 days, then must be renewed.  You can renew about four times.  after that, it was easy.  No need for bashing with bones.