Installing MS Vista
Yesterday I took the leap and bought M$ Vista Premium Home Edition. I was interested in re-installing the OS on my PC as things have been installed and reinstalled many many times over the years and I was thinking that the computer wasn’t running as smooth as it should any more. I could have just reinstalled winxp, but I needed to get a new license. It just didn’t make sense to me to go out and buy a copy of winxp when Vista will surely be the standard os within a year.
Vista comes in many different versions and flavours, and I chose the Premium edition comes with all of the eye candy and media functions, but lacks a few of the security things in the Ultimate edition. You can see a comparison of the versions on the Vista website. They also have a utility which analyzes your system and determines whether or not your hardware is compatible with Vista. My system was okay, except that I can’t use all of the functionality because of my older video card.
INSTALL The first thing I did before installing Vista was to do a drive image backup of my system drive using Acronis True Image. Next, I had to make room on my c:drive for everything, and create a partition in which to install Vista. I did this with another Acronis product, Diskdirector Suite. I barely had enough room on the drive for these two partitions, but it will be okay for some testing. Next, I tried to install Vista onto the new partition while I was logged into WinXP. Things seemed to work okay but it kept getting stuck when I tried to choose the partition to install into. I was getting asked for the correct driver for the primary ide controller. I managed to get a hold of the controller driver from the Intel website (I have an intel 845E chipset on my motherboard), but this didn’t work. So I tried rebooting and installing directly from the dvd. This worked fine. Since I have a lot of other things to do, I decided to just let Vista do it’s thing and I walked away from the computer for a few hours. When I came back, Vista was fully installed and everything was working. It is by far the easiest OS installation I’ve ever done.
Dual booting with this setup works fine, using windows’ built in boot chooser thingy mabob.
COMPATIBILITY The first thing I did was install Firefox and Thunderbird. I like to use open source software when it’s available and makes good sense. Firefox is the best PC web browser imo, and Thunderbird is an okay mail program. I prefer to use MS Outlook, but that is a very expensive program. Anyways, FF and TB installed okay and worked alright. However, my first problems occurred when I tried to install the flash plugin for FF. The plugin failed when trying to install automatically. So I downloaded the plugin from Adobe and tried a manual install. After doing this, FF wouldn’t start anymore. I kept getting an error saying that an installation was still in progress and had to finish before FF could start. I needed to uninstall and reinstall FF. So far these were a bit bumpy. I next tried to install drivers for my Echo Audio Gina3G audio card (very nice card and company imo). This install went fine and I didn’t notice any immediate problems. So with audio working I thought I’d try to install one of my audio programs. Here I ran into more problems. The program would crash whenever I tried to change the audio configuration (ie driver configuration). I kind of stopped playing around with the software at this point and went to bed. I’m not sure how much energy or enthusiasm I have for continuous installing, uninstalling and testing of this new platform. I think I will try to work on it slowly over time.
