Over the past week or so, I have installed Vista (Ultimate Edition) on three computers, with mostly positive results.
Computer One: The Mothership; RAID 0
First, I did a clean install on my primary computer, which I built myself a couple of years ago. It has a RAID 0 set, as well as 3 other drives for music and video creation and storage. I was a little nervous about installing Vista on my existing RAID set. While I have an 80G partition solely for the OS, I did not want to lose all the music and video files on the two other partitions. I know from prior experience that you have to load the RAID drivers in order for Windows to see the RAID disk configuration, but since I was dealing with a RAID set that contains a lot of huge, not all the way backed up, music and video files, I was concerned that I might accidentally send my RAID set into the ether, with all of the songs I have written and recorded and all the videos I have made along for the ride. My worry was for naught, as Vista immediately prompted me to install the RAID drivers from a floppy or CD and as soon as I did, it notified me that it could see and install onto my C drive. Installation was pretty quick and it wasn’t long before I was running Vista on a clean C partition and able to access my music and video files on the D and E partition.
Vista even stores your XP user data in a backup file on the C drive. Once I knew that I was up and running, I deleted the old data to save space.
My Vista user experience has been mostly positive, after I disabled the unbelievably annoying User Account Control. I don’t find Vista to be a revolutionary change from XP, but the more I use it, the more intuitive it seems. The only problem that persists is that when I bring Windows back up after the screensaver has been active for a few hours, my Taskbar looks weird and mouse clicks, including the one to Restart, are non-responsive. I have to Control-Alt-Delete and then Restart from that screen, where the mouse once again works correctly. Annoying, but not the end of the world.
Computer Two: The Backup Server
Next, I did a clean install on a relatively new HP Media Center computer that I bought a few months ago after the power supplies on the Mothership exploded (literally) twice in a three day period. This computer now serves as a backup server for our home network (for which I use and recommend Fileback PC). The install worked like a charm and, perhaps because this computer is newer, I have had no problems whatsover, including no Taskbar issues like I described above.
A happy by-product of this upgrade was the extermination of all the bloatware and upsell pitches that HP puts on these otherwise very nice computers.
Computer Three: The X41 Tablet
Having had two pleasant upgrade experiences, I decided to push the envelope a little by doing a clean install on my trusty Thinkpad X41 Tablet. Since the X41 does not have an internal CD or DVD drive, I had to dig up an external DVD drive. This computer has a 1.5 GHz Pentium M chip and only 512 MB of RAM- paltry by today’s Vista standards. Installation took longer, but it worked and so far I see no sluggishness. Vista did not intall drivers for the thumbprint reader, but the first time I booted up, Vista prompted me to visit the manufacturer’s web site (via a supplied link) and download the new drivers. That’s a very handy feature that saves a lot of time.
Conclusions:
Microsoft has clearly worked hard to make the installation process easier and faster. Only time will tell how much better Vista is than XP, but so far I’m pretty impressed.
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