Desktop Vista Upgrade
I bought a new Dell laptop last year that came with Vista Home Premium pre-installed. A lot of people don’t like Vista, but they don’t like it for all of the wrong reasons. Personally, I think it’s the best breakthrough O/S since Windows 95 and OSX. Anyhow, we’ve had our desktop pc for a couple of years now, it was actually built to handle Vista, but due to Vista’s release delays, I got it with XP Media Center installed. Since then, I’ve been very pleased with it’s performance, but for the longest time, it’s been yearning to have Vista installed. So this past weekend, I attempted an upgrade to Vista Home Premium. Normally, I wouldn’t recommend an OS upgrade, a fresh install is always better. But I had tons of software installed and really didn’t want to have to re-install all of it again. A quick compatibility test only warned of a SCSI driver problem. No doubt, the SCSI adapter that I use for my old 2gig Jaz drive. Not wanting to get rid of the Jaz drive, I decided to look for an updated driver and proceed with the upgrade. I should have practiced what I preach about the fresh install method over the upgrade method. Though a very, very thorough upgrade, it took over 7 hours to do the upgrade and once finished, there were still a few driver updates that needed to be addressed. When all was said and done, I really wasn’t pleased with the results. Obviously some of the software that I had installed was conflicting Windows Media Center (which is one reason I wanted to upgrade). I probably could’ve spent the next week looking for a solution from either Microsoft or the software vendor, but since I didn’t know which software was causing the issue, I decided to backup everything off of the drive that I needed and do a fresh install. So late Monday night, I proceeded to do a fresh install of Vista. The whole process took about 15 minutes and within a couple of hours, I had all of the software that I needed re-installed. And I did find out what was causing the conflict with Media Center. I use Sony Vegas 7 for video editing. Sony also installs a media manager that uses the SQL Server Desktop Engine, a big no no for Vista. So I’ve yet to re-install Sony Vegas and have decided to use Cyberlink PowerDirector as an alternative. Vista has really unleased the power of our desktop pc and the features of the new Media Center are downright awesome. Well worth the effort. Now, if they’ll only get Media Center to support digital t.v.
Mike on Sat, 16th Aug 2008 1:19 pm
Vista was/is one of the most problematic operating systems every made. We have done so many un-installs of it its unreal. Yet, another piece of crap product from Microsoft.
I’m wondering exactly what kind of issues you had with it. People who installed or upgraded to Vista expecting to see an “enhanced” version of XP are going to be disappointed. It’s a totally different and new operating system. My suggestion would be to learn about Vista before installing it. Yes, many of the same functionality exists as it did in XP, but there are many different and new options as well.
Mike on Sat, 16th Aug 2008 8:15 pm
We know Vista, a bit all too well. Thats why we always tell clients to stay clear of it. On average, I personally do at least five calls a week with clients having issues with this junk. The OS is so poorly written, its almost a joke.
Ok, I give. I’m not going to try to convince anybody that they should change their OS. However, the environment that I work in has been problem free since upgrading and installing Vista, not that we had any problems before.