I have had Windows Vista on my tablet for a while and I finally decided that I would try it out on my desktop. But, I didn’t go at it blindly. Especially since when the Vista had open Beta I tried it out and noticed that it was considerably slower than my Windows XP installation. Considering this, I first installed it on my “playing around” 15GB partition to see how it performed. After trying it out for a few days I then decided that it was ready.
So, I installed Vista around 8pm today on the main 40GB OS partition replacing the Windows XP installation. Visual Studio is one of the key programs that I use quite often so knowing that they have the 2008 beta out I had wget on the ArchLinux server working at downloading the img file. The initial Windows Vista install took under half an hour and after that it was ready for my installations and customizations. Here is what I have done so far.
- Applied all 29 or so critical and recommended Windows Updates (amazing, isn’t it? :))
- Installed Windows Mobile Device Center
- Connected the imate phone and the printer
- Installed tons of programs with only three restarts, which were mostly because of the programs that changed Windows at core. This list includes programs such as TortoiseSVN, AutoHotkey, Cisco VPN client, Daemon Tools, and cygwin.
- Turned off the autotuning feature.
Here is my impression so far.
- My computer, even though it is fairly new, is running faster than I was expecting. In some cases it seems faster than Windows XP.
- I just copied the 3.5GB Visual Studio 2005 (orcas) beta image from the server without any issues. So, hopefully I won’t have to worry about the slow file copy over the network.
- The only major annoyance that I have had is with permissions on the data partition that I was previously using with the Windows XP installation. I don’t completely blame Microsoft for this because permissions generally are hard synchronize across installations. I just think that they could have done a better job on guiding the users through fixing the permissions.
- Up until now there have only been two programs with compatibility issues.
- InterSystems’ Cache’ Studio won’t work. This isn’t too big of an issue because I have to be on the work VPN to connect to the server, and now I will just have to use Cache’ Studio on my Windows XP machine at work.
- I used AnyPassword to keep track of my passwords and this program isn’t compatible with Vista. I was surprised to find this out when I double clicked on the exe and Vista told me about it even before installing it.
In summary, so far everything is going awesome!