A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my desktop PC to Vista. In my experience, Windows needs to be wiped and reloaded about once a year to get rid of built-up crud and it was about time for my XP installation to be reloaded. Since I had a copy of Vista Ultimate and was going to have to reload XP anyway, I gave it a try. A couple of friends who are also considering this and asked me how it went.

I made complete copy of my C drive using DriveImage XML (freeware) in case something went wrong and I needed to revert. I ran the Vista Upgrade as I had read this totally wipes your Windows directory and copies over your XP stuff into Vista and there was no performance benefit from doing a fresh install. I got a lot of programs so I decided to try to save time doing this. In retrospect, I might do a fresh install next time.

• One of my 2 video cards didn’t work at all under Vista so I had to throw it away and buy a new one $$.
• Norton Antivirus doesn’t work either so I had to uninstall it and reload a fresh copy from Symantec site. The reinstall lost my license info so I had to reload that too. Annoying.
• My HP 2600n color laser jet was not supported so I couldn’t print anymore. HP says they will have a driver in June 2007. A few weeks later I found the proper driver on another HP site (!) and was able to print.
• QuickBooks 2006 is incompatible with Vista, so I had to order a new copy of QuickBooks 2007. Note: there is no upgrade pricing so you have to buy all over again. Thanks Intuit. $$$
• Two programs I rely on: VMWare and Ultramon didn’t run under Vista. Fortunately, there are betas of these two out which support Vista so I was saved.
• I had to go and download new native approved video, webcam, keyboard and mouse drivers from vendor sites even if the vendor was Microsoft in some cases. That didn’t make much sense to me.
• I synced my Windows Mobile Smartphone using the new Windows Mobile Device Center. It tried to duplicate all my data between the Smartphone and Outlook. Unbelievably bad.
• iTunes 7 will sometimes just stop playing working. No fix.
• Console2 (another favorite) also will just stop working sometimes. No fix.

Overall, it took me a few days of messing with Windows Vista and some $$$ to get up and working again. It wasn’t a disaster but not a great time either. It is no faster than XP on my machine. I am spending less time in Windows these days and more time running Ubuntu 7 which I dual boot with Vista.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 4:26 pm and is filed under Software, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.