a night of vista

I had a nagging urge yesterday to try out Vista. I arrived home, threw in some laundry, grabbed some food n bev, and fired up daemon tools. After a quick check by the Vista installer, it kindly and strongly suggested I uninstall daemon tools as well as nero due to potential complications. Okay, I wasn't there to fight the good fight, so I comply, and remove the two apps. No big deal. And also, to give myself a bit more of a warm, fuzzy, albeit scratchy, vista feeling, I download and run the Vista Upgrade Advisor (ya know, the software to "Make sure your computer is ready for the edition of Windows Vista you want.") This tells me everything is hunky dory, except for a few peripherals that will need updating, and a program or two that will be fussy (DVD player, etc.).


Fast-forward a bit: Vista got its installation going, restarts the computer, then a beautiful, all-too-familiar blue screen. Upon a few restarts, this blue screen appears consistently.

At about this moment, I had gotten thru a beer and was feeling a bit discouraged. Then, as if the gods of Microsoft heard my pain, there was a knock on the door. Yes, it was an angel of UPS... or was it Fedex... whatever, he was delivering my new bluetooth keyboard. This had to be a sign, right?

A while later I was in the middle of another installation -- this time from a clean boot. A minute later, Vista tells me "A CD/DVD drive device driver is required." This baffles me a bit, considering I'm installing from my DVD drive. A google search or two later, I direct my efforts towards feeding Vista controller drivers for my motherboard and raid card (no easy task). Skip ahead a beer more, and Vista's finally running on my machine.

I was pretty interested in using the new start menu search feature (the one that macs have had for years) to find my mouse settings (this is usually my first step because I cannot stand a slow mouse). It didn't work. Bummer.

Okay, next up: internet. Nope... need to find drivers for that, too.

Eventually I got the internet connected, tested out Media Center, and tried out a few sidebar gadgets (mostly worthless).

My two strongest positive impressions from an hour or so on Vista: the graphics are actually good -- like Microsoft took all the XP graphic design monkeys out back with a shotgun and shovel, then hired some fresh kids out of a real design school. Granted I say this all with respect to Microsoft's history of graphic "design." And secondly, the annoying notification popups are slightly less annoying.

So that's my little Vista installation story. Moral of the day: prepare all your drivers before installing because nothing useful works.