I installed Vista last night twice; the first was an upgrade from XP Pro on my laptop, the other a fresh install on my desktop. The experience was quite interesting for both; here are a few thoughts about the process:
Laptop
My laptop has a fairly modest configuration, 1.73GHz Pentium M, 512MB, 80GB hard-drive, and Mobil Intel 915 64MB for the graphics. It’s been running Windows XP Pro, last night I went through the upgrade process to Vista Business. It checking for compatibility it found a couple applications it had issues with, but it seems it wasn’t happy just telling me that they might not work, but they had to be removed before I could go on.
This required exiting setup and uninstalling both Nero and the freshly released Windows PowerShell so that I could continue. Once the offending applications were removed, I started the process again (including the 15 minute compatibility check). From here on, the process went well, although surprisingly slow. From start to first boot into Vista was a bit over three hours.
Once Vista was finally running I had my first taste of Vista, as I had not installed the betas, this was the first time I had used it. The first few minutes were full of disappointing surprises, such as the two INI files adorning my desktop, or the new ‘home’ folder full of permission errors and various configuration files. It’ll take me a fair bit of time to clean my hard drive up from that, it’s really quite a mess. On the upside, pretty much all of my software worked fine, except for the various drivers and utilities to adjust things just as power profiles and wireless network settings, but Vista includes enough to cover the functionality of everything that stopped working.
Impression: Overall positive, it’s a nice operating system, but I’m disappointed in how long it’ll take to get things cleaned up, get the permissions corrected and back to a similar setup to what I had before.
Desktop
My desktop is a bit more beefy, but still nothing special, it looks something like this: 3.0GHz Pentium 4, 1.0GB of RAM, 80GB system hard-drive (plus a separate data drive), nVidia GeForce MX4000 128MB (PCI) and a ATI Radeon 7000 64MB (AGP). This box was also running XP Pro and had been in need of rebuilding for a couple months at least.
This was a fresh install, and surprisingly quick. I made it to the first boot into Vista in around an hour, a third of the time required for the upgrade. This one went a fair bit smoother than the upgrade process and seems to be a fairly pleasant one. Once the system was up and running, I found the file system to be a fair bit cleaner than the upgrade produced.
Among the first things I checked was the ‘Experience Index’ to see where my computer ranks, and what the odds would be of getting Aero working. With a grand score of 1.0, I knew that wouldn’t happen. So, I check and sure enough my hunch was right, it was my graphics cards that were to blame. Me being the geek I am, I had to have Aero, so a 10PM run to the local Best Buy, and picked out a ATI Radeon X1600 Pro. I figured this card would have plenty of power for Aero.
Thankfully, Windows was able to identify a driver so I didn’t have to do any searching. All I had to do was reboot, and there was Aero, in all its glory. If you’ve not seen Aero yet, you don’t know what you’re missing. This new shell is great, very different, but really nice.
Impression: Quite positive, much better than the upgrade. System is stable and almost all of my normal software is working. If you’re going to install Vista, make sure your box has some beef, and start fresh. I’d advise against doing the upgrade, while it does work, it leaves a bit of a mess.
For those interested, Windows Vista is now available via MSDN Subscriber Downloads. Hurry up and get your copy while there’s still bandwidth left.
Have fun 
The legendary Robert Scoble has just posted word the Vista may now be gold. It’ll be interesting to see when we get official word. I don’t know about anyone else, but I can’t wait till Vista hits the MSDN Subscriber downloads so I can start playing with the final.
The final public beta build (5744) of the next generation of Windows has been released (via shell: revealed). With this announcement it looks like Vista will indeed be on time. For awhile I was wondering if Vista had any chance of making it, but it seems that it will indeed. While this is certainly good news, the RTM build is the one that has my interest.
Playing with a release candidate can be fun, there’s no doubt about it; but the real fun starts when you can see how things work and behave on the final – (hopefully) working build. I’ve got a ton of software to test, and a number of applications to update to take advantage of the latest goodies Vista offers – that’s the fun part.
Ever wondered how they do things inside of Microsoft? As a developer that makes extensive uses of Microsoft technologies and tools, I’m always interested in an insight into their development process. Well, if you’re like me, then I may have a real treat for you.
Vinny Pasceri, the AERO Program Manager for Microsoft has posted an great insight on the (fairly new) Windows Client Team Blog. This is a great peak into what the design process looks like, and even includes what may be the first publicly released feature spec. This makes for a great read, I highly recommend taking a close look at this article and the included spec.
While going through my (long) list of RSS-feeds that I monitor, I found this gem of an article: Vista Transformation Pack: Vista-ize your XP. The Vista Transformation Pack is a clever little application that moves your XP desktop several steps closer to the beauty that is Vista. While the ‘transformation’ doesn’t give you all of the new UI goodies that come with Vista, it does add a fair bit of eye candy.
I’m not typically one to promote UI tweaks like this, but after playing with the settings, I’ve now have a great looking setup without the instability that still goes with Vista.
