Upgrading to Windows Vista Ultimate

So I made way to Best Buy yesterday and bought a copy Windows Vista Ultimate. I asked for the Signature Edition and got it- good deal since it was the same price ($259). Freebies included in the deal were 512 Megs of Kingston DDR memory (I got the notebook one), Taxcut Premium, and LiveOne Care (they were out of stock so gave me a raincheck). I also bought the D-Link DIR-625 Rangebooster N Router for $30 (a $50 savings from the regular price)- haven't even opened it. My current plan is to use it as a router only and disable its wireless since I'm already using the Belkin Pre-N router as a wireless gateway. My current router is the Buffalo WHR-G54s flashed w/ DD-WRT. I'm actually pretty happy with it but figure I could move it to another room to work as a wireless bridge. We'll see. Anyways back to the upgrade.

First I needed to open the case. I must be an idiot because I thought it opens like a book, so I kept yanking until the bottom plastic peg became partly dislodged. Apparently the innards of the case rotates out to the right, with the bottom right corner as the spoke. Oops.

I have a HP Pavilion DV9000t notebook with the XB3000 dock. Windows XP Media Center was preinstalled. Before the upgrade I made sure to back up my drive via Acronis True Image to a desktop PC. Then I had to decide whether to install the 32 bit Vista Ultimate or the 64 bit. After some research I decided to go with the 64 bit since it apparently offered better performance & security. I was okay at that point with possibly not having the latest/greatest drivers and not being able to run 16-bit apps.

So I popped in the Vista Ultimate 64 bit upgrade DVD and an error message popped up saying I couldn't install while still in Windows- I image that's because my Windows XP is 32 bits. So I was like- okay let's do it- rebooted the computer and booted up the DVD. The installer grayed out the "upgrade" method, saying that I would have to run the installer within the existing version of Windows (which didn't work for me). So since I had my entire drive backed up I went ahead and pick the option where it would do a clean install and move my old Windows into another folder.

The install took well over an hour- perhaps a big reason was that my hard drive is only 5400 RPM. Once it was done I noticed the video was pretty low res (800x600), but admirably Vista went and automatically downloaded new 64 bit drivers for the built-in GeForce 7600 card. In fact it pretty much found all the drivers- the Conexant HD audio, the modem, the network card, the built-in wireless, etc. The audio mixer was spartan- it only had a single master volume control- no separate controls for wav, midi, etc. But that wasn't a big deal at all for me. It could not, however, find the drivers for my Samsung SCX4100 AIO printer, which was a bummer.

I have to admit I was a little lost with the new interface since I never played with any of the Vista betas. On the desktop there was only a single icon- the Recycle Bin. Gone were the familiar My Computer, Network Places, and My Documents. To navigate your hard drive you're now supposed to click on the new round Windows "start" button, then select "Computer". Interestingly the new "explorer" doesn't seem to have a name, and looks a little like the file browser my sister uses on her Mac OS X notebook.

There was a new bar with gadgets on the right side of the screen. To my dismay, however, you can't seem to resize the gadgets- or at least the two I was interested in- the stock gadget & the rss gadget. You have to hit a button to expand or scroll up the and down to view the list of data. I turned off the gadgets and installed Google Desktop w/ the sidebar instead.

I noticed a lot of cool new features- taskbar window previews, built-in ability to fix photos, a neat network mapper, and the performance gauge. Also I was eager to try some of the Ultimate Extras features. Going to Windows Update Vista fetched a Texas Hold'em Game- looked pretty decent but I didn't play around with it much. I wanted to try out Dreamscene (the feature in Ultimate where it lets you use a .mpg or a .wmv file as background), but didn't find it anywhere. Perhaps it'll be available later on Windows Update.

Now it came to upgrading/installing the apps. There was not 64 bit version of Firefox 2.0, but I installed the regular 32 bit version and it worked fine. 32 bit apps have a designated "*32" appened at the end of the app name when you view the task manager. The same was with Thunderbird (1.5.0.9), the email client I use. The one quirk I noticed with these Firefox & Thunderbird was that they can't be made the default browser and email client, respectively. Apparently Mozilla knows about the bug and is working on it.

Then came the show stopper for me- I could not get Microsoft (yes "Microsoft") Small Business Accounting 2006 to work. During the install Vista gave warnings that there are known issues w/ the app under the new OS, but I forced it to install anyways. Even though I had concerns about data import I thought maybe I'll try out the 2007 version so I downloaded the trial. version. Before installing I tried uninstall the "Microsoft SQL Server Desktop Engine (MICROSOFTSMLBIZ)" that was added by SBA 2006 but it just won't go away. It looks like it's removing it but in the end it stays on the list.

Another annoying problem was that after waking from sleep a lot of times my secondary monitor (connected to the xb3000 dock) became the primary monitor, and I would have to go in and manually change it back. What's even worse right now for some reason Vista can't even turn on my laptop LCD screen (the main monitor). It's most likely an Nvidia driver issue.

I am going to revert back to Windows XP for now. As a tech enthusiast I supposed I was overzealous in upgrading to Vista right away. At this point I do not recommend upgrading unless you are prepared to deal with driver issues and app issues. If you do you might want to go with the 32 bit version to avoid some of the driver problems. I will go back to Vista for sure, but probably not for another 6 months or so until more 64 bit drivers are available and some of the app issues are ironed out.

Unfortunately the Acronis True Image 8.0 rescue CD didn't come with the network drivers for the laptop/dock. So I am going to have to resort to copying the image to a USB HDD and then connecting it to the notebook to do the restore.

That is it for now- hasta la Vista ;-).