Database Underground | Sean McCown » VISTAphilia

December 15, 2006 | Comments: (0)

VISTAphilia

TAGS: Microsoft

I've got one issue that if any of you guys on the Windows team are listening, I could use some guidance. Keep reading...

So I finally took the plunge and upgraded my main workstation to Vista. What can I say except that I completely love this OS. I bought a top of the line Velocity box a couple months ago in preparation for this, and I'm able to take full advantage of the new graphics. It's just a beautiful design and I think it far out-does anything Mac and Linux are doing. I'm already taking advantage of a lot of the new features as well. I'm not going to go into too much detail about the wonders of it all because you can read that anywhere.

What I do want to talk about though is my upgrade experience. This is just kind of a primer for those of you who are thinking of making the leap yourselves. First of all, definitely run the >upgrade advisor first. There are several things that will stop your upgrade. Most of them are apps that are incompatible though, and once you get past them, you should be ok.

I had to uninstall >Roxio and >Acronis before I could upgrade, but no big loss. I hear though that Acronis now has a Vista release. Anyway though... the upgrade itself took around 3hrs. I did an upgrade in >VMWare before, and it was much quicker, but my workstation has a lot of apps on it, so it took quite some time. The upgrade process rebooted several times and often times seemed to be dead, but regardless of how long it takes, it's still plugging along. When it finally came up though, it was flawless. I had some initial concerns about my wireless USB card, but when all was said and done, the driver mapped just fine.

There were a couple driver problems, but they were very minor and I got them worked out with little trouble. The sound card was one of them, and I was lucky that there was a beta Vista driver online that I was able to plug in just fine. There's some PCI controller thingy (sorry to be so technical) that doesn't seem to have a compatible driver, but things seems to be working just fine without it, so no blood no foul I guess. I had some trouble with my DVD burners, but once I upgraded my motherboard chipset drivers, they started working again. Finding the chipset drivers on Intel was very easy, and I had what I needed in just a couple minutes.

My only outstanding issue is with the Vista Help. For some reason, every time I go to bring up Windows help on anything it tells me that it can't find the site. Then it just searches forever. I let it run overnight one time and it never returned anything. So if there's anybody on the Windows team reading, I could use some help on this.

Otherwise, I've got no problems, and I'm just Lovin' life. Windows team: EXCELLENT work!!! Maybe the SQL team could contract a couple of you boys to do their front end as well.

Posted by Sean McCown on December 15, 2006 07:15 AM

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