Windows Vista, initial thoughts

Inquitus

Hi All,

My daughter knocked over our PC and that destroyed my existing boot drive. I had "borrowed" my copy of XP from a previous job, and as such had no media for a new install of XP.

I bought from Komplett a Vista Ultimate DVD OEM version for €175, along with a new Harddrive to install it to (a nice Sata II 16MB Cache Western Digital 500GB number).

I have read much in the press recently decrying Vista and the frustration of installing it and getting drivers to work with it, I wanted to share my experience.

I installed it all the drivers for my XFI-Fatality, 7800GTX, DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR expert, Belkin USB Wireless G etc etc and everything worked flawlessly 1st time. I have installed Wow, BF2 and all run great. *Note all drivers installed were vista beta or better drivers from device manufacturers website.

The only small bit of frustration I experienced in the whole process (which took under 2 hours) was that the OEM version of Vista wont install on any drive that is not listed in the BIOS as the primary boot drive, after several attempts to format, partition the new drive I used my laptop to google the error message (Windows cannot find an installable partition on the selected drive) and found a forum post detailing the above issue.

I am far from a windows or microsoft fan, but I have to be amazed at how easy I found this fresh install of Vista. It was easier and less trouble then an XP Install.

I must admit having a laptop to dl the Vista Drivers and a USB key to transfer then helped alot, and using the original driver cd's would probably have been a disaster.

It runs like a dream, tho I do more than meet the requirements with an X4800+ CPU and 4GB of Ram etc, and I have to say so far I like it.

As I had to buy a new OS after my mishap I had a choice of going XP Pro again or Vista for about the same cost, all the press coverage of this made me favour ignoring Vista and going with XP again, but I am glad in the end I took a chance.

Inqui

lodgepole

Sounds similar to my experience. I prepared fairly well by burning a disc with all of the drivers i'd need to get myself off the ground. The only trouble I had was getting my wireless card working, but that was resolved pretty easily. Like you I have a fairly powerful machine, so performance hasn't been an issue.

One interesting thing that has been happening is that certain programs won't recognise my 120gig IDE HD. It's not a big issue, it's only in there because there was space, I don't actually use it for anything currently.

Have you had much chance to get used to Vista? I've had it installed about three weeks now and i'm really loving how it works. There are many small differences between it and XP.

Also... Check out some of the new accessories... Snipping tool in particular.

Nick_oliveri

Snipping tool eh? What does this do? Some of my large video folders take waaay to long to load in explorer with the icons and such. Maybe they should have thought about permanently indexing a folder until the filesize or properties changes...

lodgepole

I've had that problem too, particularly on my external HD.

Don't get too excited about the snipping tool... All it does is dim the whole desktop, and give you access to a clipping type cursor, which you can use to select a portion of the desktop. This portion is then imported into paint where it can be saved as a jpeg (possibly png... i'm not home so I can't check). It's not amazing or anything, but great for pulling specific snapshots without having to prick about in photoshop or the gimp.

I'm still missing my image resizer XP powertool though...

LFCFan

The only issues I have with Vista at the moment is that DivX isn't fully supported and I get that damn 'Com Surrogate' error message when accessing DivX files. This and that MS haven't provided 64bit drivers yet for the fingerprint reader. Other then these 2 issues, I am very happy with Vista.

Ginger

Also on my dual boot XP/Vista, using the beta Vista drivers will cause your XP ones to fail as it will update them as well by the looks of it!!! GAH