As I mentioned Friday, I now have a laptop on which I have installed Windows Vista Ultimate for x64. It's a Compaq Presario V6000, and it's not what I would have chosen for myself, but it was available for me to use, and the price was right. Why? Rob Cheng at PC Pitstop did a study of the bloatware on new laptop PCs from eight major manufacturers, and couldn't return most of them because of the manufacturers' very short return periods. (I recommend viewing the video Rob made and listening to his NPR interview.)

I actually got two of those leftovers for testing, a Sony Vaio with an Intel T2060 (Core Duo) CPU and this one, which has an AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 CPU. The Intel T2000 series CPUs don't support 64-bit mode, but I had some other debugging to do on the Sony. Using the machine as delivered gave me fits: not only was the installed bloatware constantly popping up and being annoying, but I was never able to get the networking working properly. I eventually had to use an SD card as a "sneaker net" to load the software I wanted to test onto the Sony, and got the software fixed after a couple of iterations.

After I sent the Sony off to the poor lucky person who bought it (cheap), I tried booting up the Presario, and found its bloatware just as annoying as the Vaio's had been. I rebooted the Compaq and used its F11 boot option to format and reload the main disk partition, hoping that it would offer me the option to choose a 32- or 64-bit system. It didn't, but I let it go ahead and reinstall 32-bit Windows Vista Home Premium anyway.

The bloatware was just as annoying after a fresh install, but at least the networking worked properly, both at my office and at home. I also gained some confidence that as long as I didn't mess with the D: disk partition, I'd be able to get the computer back to its "out of the box" state in an hour or so. Knowing that, I felt pretty good about booting from a Vista x64 DVD and installing Windows Vista Ultimate for x64.

That was fairly straightforward, although I did have some panicky moments when I thought I would have to go trolling the Internet for drivers. Eventually, the system found all the drivers it needed by itself, except for the HP Deskjet 3915 driver needed to print on my home network: apparently, HP hasn't yet gotten around to the Vista drivers for that little consumer printer. C'est la vie. I also had some panicky moments when the networking misbehaved, but it mysteriously started working on its own.

Most of the software I have installed on the 64-bit system so far works. The software I'm developing has issues, but that was the point of getting the system here in the first place. Windows Live Writer beta 2 also has issues, but I'm working with that team at Microsoft to track them down. Meanwhile, I'm blogging from Word 2007, and fixing up the categories online, since Word doesn't seem to know how to download categories from a blog.

On the other hand, Second Life works fine on this laptop. And, of course, so do the all-important solitaire games. J

Posted by Martin Heller on June 11, 2007 06:00 AM