Windows Vista? Don't Rush
I like to like Windows. I like to like Microsoft products in general--that's how I make my living, right? I wish I could say I loved Vista. I do not. I really, really do not.
I've been installing Vista and getting the installation to be marginally stable since Saturday. It's now mid-day on Wednesday. I've worked on this all day, every day, since Saturday. As background, let me say that I've built my own computers, and installed Windows often (far too often) on them for 15 years, since the days of Windows 3.1. I'm pretty good at this, both in terms of the hardware, and the software (if I may say so myself). Not an expert by any means, but I have built a lot of computers over the years.
For this event, I reused an existing motherboard (Intel 955XBK, pretty reliable, with full support for 64EMT, so it's relatively new), a P4 3.0 GHz chip, 4GB memory, and a reasonably new 250GB SATA drive. I used the 1GB ethernet built into the motherboard, and counted on using the USB, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 ports built into the motherboard as well (these all worked fine in Windows XP, and Windows XP 64, which I tried before I started down the Vista path).
Given that I'm embarking on courseware that will benefit from the Vista "look", I decided to attempt to install Vista Ultimate (the released version). And that's when the problems started. (Amazingly, Vista did recognize the Intel RAID that's built into the motherboard, so I didn't have to play the F6 shuffle as I booted up the installation.) I formatted the 250GB drive, partitioned it into 80 and 170 GB partitions (more or less), and at this point, Vista tells me (rephrased, I don't remember the exact message) "Vista is unable to find a suitable partition on which to install." WTF? Here we sit with two very nice, suitable partitions, yet it won't install.
Google to the rescue: it turns out that Vista won't install on a drive unless it's the first drive listed in the BIOS boot order. I'm not sure if that's quite true, but making the drive the first drive in the boot order after a reboot certainly fixed the problem. Perhaps this is mentioned in the documentation somewhere, and I had only to RTFM, but I generally make the DVD drive the first drive in the boot order, so I can always boot from DVD if necessary. And there's an hour of my life I'll never get back, when Vista could have told me what the problem was and how to fix it.
Once installed, the network connection was totally flaky. Vista found drivers for the mobo's ethernet, and it seemed to work, but every now and then, would simply lose its connection. Or, even better, not a single download from the Internet ever completed. It would start, fast and furious, and then just time out. I could go to my WinXP laptop and download the same file, but it just wouldn't work on Vista.
A friend suggested replacing the NIC ("cut the deck in half", as it were), so I did. And amazingly, the explicit NIC card works fine. Completely solved the problem. But really, the NIC built into the motherboard should have either worked, or not, right? I've never had an intermittent failure problem like that with XP.
The USB 2.0 external drive I have used for years has become incredibly flaky under Vista. Sometimes Vista is unable to write to the drive. Once it fails (calculating the time it's going to take to copy the file, ad nauseum), the drive is corrupt and I have to reformat and rebuild it. I've done this three times now. The drive works flawlessly with WinXP, on the laptop, but Vista simply can't interact with it in a reliable fashion.
WinXP provided full support for the built-in 1394a and 1394b (FireWire 400 and 800) ports on the motherboard. Vista? Not so much. Can't mount a drive on either.
Media Center seems to work relatively well, although I find the new UI difficult to master. Took me a long time to figure out that the menus are "2-dimensional", and using the keyboard, how to control exactly which item I wanted selected.
Software installation has gone better than hardware, although I'm constantly running into little things that don't work right, as expected, or as promised. IE 7 continues to misfire, failing to load pages on Vista that load fine in IE 7 on XP. I thought, before I lived with it, that UAC (User Access Control) was a great idea. Perhaps it is, once you have a stable, and unchanging, machine. As I installed stuff, it just plain drove me nuts. I finally just turned it off, as I guess almost anyone reading this missive will, as well. So much for security!
I'm writing this the week before Vista goes live, publicly. I can't even imagine how much wailing and gnashing of teeth there's going to be when the public gets this. I just imagine my father going down to CompUSA, picking up and upgrade, and attempting to survive it. (Believe me, he's not going to do that. He's smarter than that.)
Maybe you'll be able to take an existing computer and get Vista fully up and running as a development machine easier than I did. After five days at this, I'm just about ready to work. I've got Office 2007, VS 2005 (SP1 + the beta Vista patch), Quicken 2006, Quickbooks 2007, iTunes 7.0.2 and more, all running (for the moment). But should it take 5 days?
For me, this has been a terrible, terrible experience. All my friends are tired of hearing me whine about it. I'm glad to be done, and I'm sure the next time I do it, it will go easier. I'm sure many people will tell me that I'm just an idiot, and that Vista is a simple install. (I didn't even attempt an upgrade...) I'll just smile.