Preparing for Vista – Part 2

So I took the plunge and bought the disk (OEM – Home Premium Edition) and after a little coaxing my PC Darth (named by my girlfriend), see picture – he has big ideas about ruling the universe and sees himself in this way, agreed to take the plunge with me.

Now bearing in mind all the hype about how easy it is to install and so on I did my research and read what was available and feeling comfortable with my level of knowledge backed everything up at least twice, put the disk in and rebooted. To my surprise Vista really did install in about 20 minutes, no hassle just a nice clean problem free installation; so new toys installed I started to play and started to find things I liked and didn’t like.

I like the on-screen displays where you can opt to have your clock, and Post-it style pad and calendar – all very useful and nicely placed at eye line so when you are working the information is just there with no hunting to separate apps or corners of the screen. I would add the caveat that for these toys to be really useful you benefit from a wide screen, if I was using a standard screen such as my PC at work I think these would have taken up too much real estate. Office 2003 was problem free the only thing I noticed with this and other apps was a lag when starting up; once open and running they were nice and quick.

What I didn’t like was the fact that pretty much all my favourite programmes are not Vista compatible and I resent the idea of spending hundreds of pounds replacing everything; although there is a lot built into Vista like most people I like what I’m used to. The one tip I would give anyone thinking of going down the Vista road is dual boot with what you have now, don’t forget to read up on this first, but remember once you install Vista it’s the Vista MBR that takes over however a programme called EasyBCD can help with this.

However, if you do decide, like me, to install a nice shiny new hard drive and go for it partition it first. If I called the Vista partition tool garbage it would be elevating it to a status it does not deserve; Vista needs no more than 30GB to play with but this tool will only allow you to split the hard drive into 2; which when you have 250GB is not what you want; you can achieve the partitioning quite easily using the free Linux tool GParted, http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ , or via your preferred software.

So what do I think so far; despite my gripes I like it. For the time being, Darth and I have gone back to XP for the sake of convenience and saving a lot of money but I do have plans to dual boot with Vista and I am currently also considering a triple boot with Ubuntu – all things for the future, tested via MS Virtual PC or I will be the first person to be a victim of a PC mounted Death Ray according to Darth.