After receiving my free Microsoft Power Together Campaign copy of Windows Vista Business last Tuesday I decided this weekend I should install it. So that I did. And it took three days.
SUNDAY
I tried doing an upgrade… FAILED… apparently CD Drive emulation software is not well liked by the Vista installer… so after 3 reboots and several trips to the system registry the upgrade went through. Now the upgrade actually began. I went to sleep because it took so long and in the morning the installer said that the upgrade had failed and the old windows version had been reinstalled.
MONDAY
Seeing that the upgrade had failed, I decided to delete some crap and create a new partition where I could do a fresh install.
The fresh install worked great and I was so impressed with the operating system I decided to transition fully to Vista without worrying about my old user settings. So I transferred my app data folders over to the new applications installed in Vista. So now my Vista Firefox looked and had all the same extensions as my XP Firefox. But I soon realized that my 15GB partition wouldn’t hold all my apps, and the 45GB on my primary partition was being mainly wasted…
TUESDAY
I couldn’t format my primary partition because it had all the boot files, so I installed Vista on it and then transferred all my data from the first Vista install on the secondary partition into the new Vista install on the primary partition. I then formatted the secondary partition and merged the two partitions to create my full drive once again.
Conclusion
Vista is a far superior OS to XP. It runs smoother on my 3 year old laptop than XP did, and my computer scored a 3.3 on the new computer rating thingy. Highly recommended… just don’t do an upgrade install, do a clean install and save a lot of time. It turns out when you do a “clean install” of Vista from within XP, Vista’s installer rolls the old XP install into a folder called Windows.old which includes all your old user files and everything. I wish I’d known that before I installed!
Is Vista an OSX ripoff? Yes. Is it a good OSX ripoff? Yes. My new desktop is very shiny so I’ll be blinded to Vista’s flaws for a few more days.
I should like to point out that you cannot install an upgrade version of Vista if you have an OEM version of XP. I know because I have an email from Microsoft. I tried unsuccessfully to install Vista on my computer with no success and finally contacted Microsoft. I was told I would need a full version copy! Now who’s laughing all the way to the bank?
Nice site very easy to use and good info.