I’m certain I’m not the only one who has had this problem in the past. Here is the dilemma; you have Windows Vista and have purchased the Anytime Upgrade for Windows Vista Ultimate, the problem, the upgrade fails every time you try to perform it.

It took a Microsoft technician in India 176 minutes to finally figure out how to get to the root of the problem and get the upgrade to go through. Nice guy by the way, I learned a lot about him during our call.

At any rate, if you are having a problem upgrading Windows Vista try disabling some services and removing any anti-virus programs and CD burning software, Roxio and Nero are perfect culprits. Simply uninstall them before trying the upgrade.

Next up, disable some Windows features, to do this you’ll need to head to the control panel, go to Programs and Features, and click Turn Windows features on or off. Then, disable the following:

• Under Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0, disable the XPS Viewer
• Disable Remote Differential Compression
• Disable Windows DFS Replication Service

The one thing I forgot to mention was that graphics cards and Ethernet cards are also a prime reason that upgrades fail, so head into the device manager and disable both of them.

Now try to perform the upgrade, using Upgrade as the option… with any amount of luck it will work, then you can re-install the drivers for your graphics card and re-enable your Ethernet card to activate your copy of Windows Vista Ultimate.

If the upgrade fails, there is still hope, you’ll just need to perform a custom upgrade. Now, the Windows Anytime Upgrade disc has all the files needed to perform a clean install of Windows Vista Ultimate, the problem is, since this is an upgrade, it needs to be associated with another Vista activation code (the one you are upgrading).

So, we perform the same steps, but instead of selecting upgrade we select Custom (Advanced) Install. This allows you to select a particular partition to install Windows onto. I suggest installing it right over the old Windows installation (all of your old files we be placed into a folder called Windows.old, so don’t worry about losing anything)… although I do recommend backing up important files to a removable drive before performing any type of upgrade.

There you have it, and hopefully you did it quicker than the 176 minutes it took me. Good luck, feel free to post comments or questions.