Upgrading to Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit

This long weekend, I was fixing a friend's computer (Athlon X2 3800+), but it turned out that both the motherboard and the case needed to be replaced.  I had a Gigabyte AM2+ mainboard I bought off Kijiji a couple of years ago with an Athlon X2 5000+ Black Edition running Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit.  So, I took out my board and put it into a different case with her hard drive.  Because of this, I now had a free Windows Vista Home Premium license.  I had a six core Phenom II with 16 Gig on an MSI mainboard I built earlier this year running Ubuntu.  I wanted to convert that to Windows Vista Home Premium, but I needed the 64-bit edition to take advantage of the 16 gig of Mushkin DDR3 I had.  Previously, I had done several searches for Vista 64-bit, but I had no luck (even on E-bay) to find something cheap.  The link given in the box by Microsoft to buy Vista 64-bit disk was no longer active.  Yesterday, I found a link at Dell which showed one how to create a Windows Vista 64-bit install disk.  This link has excellent instructions and I downloaded the required files and created my own 64-bit Windows Vista install DVD.

Now, even with upgrade editions of Vista, it is possible to do a fresh install.  That was the case with the 32-bit version, but this 64-bit disk I created insisted my DVD key needed to have a pre-existing Windows installation on the hard drive.  I tried installing Windows 2000 first.  It screwed things up big time.  The Vista install couldn't see any partitions.  So, I installed Windows XP Pro and activated the installation.  Then I stuck in the 64-bit Vista install disk I made and it let me install Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition. Doing all 119 Windows updates followed by installation of Vista SP2 took about 4 hours!