Since many people would agree with me that Windows Vista has a lot of problems for developers, the only option is to revert back to Windows XP Pro on all these new pre-installed Vista laptops. But 90% of the time, upgrading poses this stumper:

Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer

To fix this issue, we need to change the SATA/ RAID mode one and disable caching as shown here:

http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic18329.html

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows/resolving-setup-did-not-find-any-hard-disk-drives-during-windows-xp-installation/