Yep, it’s true, I’ve switched from Windows XP to Windows Vista Ultimate. Since I use my computer for real-world applications like designing websites, building programs, and managing my day-to-day business communications, I thought I’d write-up what was involved in upgrading and how Vista’s treating me 1 month in.
Upgrade from XP
I chose the clean install route and I’d definitely recommend it. Windows XP has tons of junk in it’s registry and it’s always going to be best starting clean. I backed all my files up onto my external Maxtor OneTouch II drive (which incidently, Vista reports problems with when you plug it in for the first time – but, actually works fine! “aroo?”) , reformatted the my laptop’s hard disk and Vista installed fine. I did purchase a 1gb RAM upgrade for my laptop (Crucial were £100 cheaper than the cheapest listing on Froogle) which takes it up to 2gb RAM in total – and I’m glad I did because Vista uses all available RAM to boost application performance.
There’s been lots of reports about hardware and software incompatibility issues with Vista, leading to blue screen of death (BSOD) for many users. Yep, there’s a lot of that out there, and I think your upgrade experience is going to be very hit and miss depending on whether or not your hardware manufacturer has written a good set of Vista drivers. For example, my Dad bought a brand-new Vista-preinstalled Acer laptop. All worked fine until I tried to upgrade it to Vista Ultimate – turns out the default RAID controller isn’t compatible and it blue screened on boot. Fortunately in that scenario I was able to fallback to the previous configuration, so Microsoft sort-of wins a point back for that. But you hear what I’m saying – I was lucky because Sony has done a reasonable job of providing new Vista drivers for my Vaio VGN-SZ2VP.
One last thing to note, my laptop has an Intel PRO Wireless 3945ABG network adapter as part of it’s Centrino configuration. Last night Wechel told me that the Intel drivers for Vista for this adapter are buggy as hell and did nasty things to his PC. Best thing to do is use the Windows Vista default WiFi driver for this adapter – it works fine.
1 month in
There’s lots in Vista to like – the user interface (UI) does make WinXP looks so 2001. The network browsing works like it should’ve back in 1995 (no more Explorer locking up when browsing a workgroup! hooray!) The redesigned Start menu is a godsend for those of us who have lots of applications installed. Performance-wise it runs well. Sometimes the hard disk light goes crazy and you can tell it’s doing something under the hood, but application performance doesn’t drop off like it would in WinXP. In that sense, you need to start thinking differently about the HD light meaning your computer is doing something and when you see RAM usage at 95% don’t panic – it’s just Vista making the most of your resources (why have 2gb RAM if you only ever use 1.5gb?)
But, there’s still lots of mess. The network connections windows are confusing and I often find myself going round in circles to achieve something as simple as disabling a network adapter. There’s a couple of blatant bugs in Explorer, a few too many this-that-or-the-other program has stopped responding errors when browsing media files (I guess the thumbnailer/properties retriever program is falling over with some codec). Oh yes, and of course – User. Access. Control. Affectionately known as UAC. This puppy lasted 10 minutes before I found a fix to stop it nagging me every five minutes. Don’t get me wrong, UAC is great because it prevents nasty programs doing naughty things, but does it have to dim my screen before giving me a system modal window? Anyways, Vista was easier to live with when I turned it down a notch. There’s still a lot of hand-holding prompts which I’m sure my Mum would love, but as a power-user it’s a sigh away from annoying.
Getting on with the day-to-day
As most of you know, I’m a developer and designer. My core applications include, but aren’t limited to:
Microsoft Office 2007 is designed for Vista, works great and integrates well with the Vista built-in indexing mechanisms, nothing to fault there. uTorrent and eMule have both had recent refreshes with Vista fixes and work fine.
VS2003 is unsupported by Vista – I’ve not tried to run it, I’ve read plenty about trying to, and I like having a full head of hair so I’ve no intention of trying to make it work. Instead, when I need it, I’ll fire it up in a virtual machine (see below).
VS2005 is sort-of supported in Vista. There’s a couple of things you need to do to make it work (start here, then this, or this), but it does work, and I’m pretty happy with it now.
Ahh yes, Photoshop CS2. Reported not to work. It does work, but there’s a few bugs – the eyedropped doesn’t always select the right colour, sometimes PS goes a bit nuts with the disk and locks up for 10 seconds. But apart from those two things, it works ok for me…? Guess I’ll upgrade to CS3 soon anyhoo. Illustrator works fine as far as I can see.
Adobe Flash CS3 works ok – I’ve not seen any bugs.
Adobe Premiere Pro 2 works, but it took a bit of jiggery pokery to make it work. See here.
Nero has been my choice of CD/DVD burning software for years and version 7 is Vista certified. Works great. Although you may want to remove the Nero Scout (Ahead: why did you make this abomination?!). Updated: some Nero users have been getting this error: “Windows Process (Rundll32) has stopped working” when browsing MPEG (movie) files – solution here.
When things don’t work
If you run into something that doesn’t work in Vista, there’s a couple of options. First you can right click on the program, goto Properties, then the Compatibility tab and check “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and choose Windows XP SP 2.
The most common thing that works is right click the program, and choose Run as Administrator. Often UAC (mentioned above) prevents certain operations that would’ve been fine under WinXP but require administrator permissions now.
And lastly, the ultimate solution – run a virtual machine of Windows XP. (“EH? WTF is that?!”) If you don’t know, Microsoft has a free download called Microsoft Virtual PC (although it only runs on Vista Business or Vista Ultimate – read why) – it can run a virtualized version of Windows from a single hard disk image file. It’s like a PC in a PC and you can choose whether or not to keep the changes from each session so it works pretty well as a sandbox for installing trial or suspicious applications. I have a base install for Windows XP Pro SP2 which I store on my external drive so I can create more clean WinXP machines, and a version I run on my laptop which has Visual Studio 2003 installed on it. Whenever I need VS2003, I just fire up the virtual machine, and voila! Maybe some other day I’ll do a write-up about virtual machines, because they’re awesome, but not today.
Let me know your experiences
If you’ve just upgraded, please write-me and let me know. I’d love to hear about it and if you’ve got something useful I’ll post it here so other people can benefit from your experience.
Update
Since I published this article, there’s been a steady flow of Vista bugs and solutions. I’ll maintain this list in the hope that it’ll be useful for pre Service Pack 1 users…
bginfo.zip (384KB)