Have you tried SP1 yet? I took the plunge and upgraded both my Vista Home Premium machine (a Core 2 Quad HP m8100y) and my HP nc6400 Core 2 Duo laptop.
They both took a long time to do the upgrade. Definitely don’t kick it off unless you have time to go eat, run errands, or read War and Peace. The good thing is it was very automated and didn’t require any interaction after it was started.
The desktop completed successfully after a reboot or two and seems to be functioning correctly. I did have a blue screen, but I also replaced some existing RAM with higher capacity sticks, so it could have been that. I know that one should never make more than one change to help isolate problems, but I find it hard to follow that methodology.
The laptop; however, seemed to have a problem and now won’t finish booting. I guess I’ll have to reboot with a Vista DVD and let it do a repair, but what a pain! I’ll post more when I figure out how to fix it. I am just thinking about reloading the thing with a fresh copy of Vista with SP1 already integrated…
Later
I have Vista loaded on my work computer and it started acting wonky. I would plug in my generic USB drive or two and Vista would prompt me for drivers. Drivers?!? for a USB drive? I scoured the interwebs looking for an answer, hoping that someone else had dealt with this and figured it out.
Well, I found a couple of sites where people had ‘solutions, but none worked until I found one that said something that sounded wierd (I’ll try to get the originating website). The answer: Copy the \Windows\Inf file to another location (outside of \Windows), then reboot. Next time Windows can’t find a driver, point it over to your copy of \Inf.
It may not work for you, but it did solve my problem…
Ok, given my earlier rant about my XP->Vista upgrade woes, I thought I’d follow-up with my thoughts on Vista now that I’ve lived with it for about two weeks.
Overall, I’d say that I like the upgrade. The visual effects are pretty and I like the Aero effects, but I really like a lot of the little touches more. The differences in the way explorer works makes navigation even quicker. I like how the Start Menu/Programs work. As I more often use Run than not, being able to quickly type in the app I am after is a blessing.
Performance seems to be pretty good too. I do notice a slight dedegration in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter, but it’s barely noticable. Battlefield:2142 plays nicely and the Lord of the Rings Online beta looked great.
I do have a slight battle between Vista and the nVidia drivers going on. I think the class action against nVidia is silly, but the driver keeps wanting to switch which of my LCDs is primary, so there certainly is work needed there. [update: the updated drivers made available work much bette]
Creative Labs finally got off their duffs and published some decent Audigy2 drivers, so I was able to switch back to that vs the on-board sound.
At the risk of dating myself (“I’m 39, I’m not old”), I’ve been installing operating systems for a long time. I’ve been installing, re-installing, scripting installing, etc. Windows since 3.11 and I know what I’m doing. Er, at least I thought I knew what I was doing. What I didn’t realize is that Microsoft had changed some of the rules. But before that, let’s cover some background.
If you frequently re-install your OS, you have probably come up with a few shortcuts and customizations that help you when you go back and do it again, and again, and again… For Windows XP, I always create a C: partition for the OS and applications, and a D: partition for all my data files, downloads, etc. By segregating OS from data, I can re-install XP at my leisure with no risk to my data. To keep my data on the D: partition, I use TweakUI to redirect My Documents, Desktop, Favorites, My Pictures, My Music, etc. over to the D: drive so I don’t have to move or copy data back and forth. When I re-install XP, I redirect those system folders and I’m good to go.
At this point, you might have figured out where I am heading with this… Read the rest of this entry »