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Quirks and Tips For Upgrading To Vista
jcatcw writes "Computerworld's Scot Finnie has some advice for those considering an upgrade to Vista. He praises the work Microsoft has done on the installation program, but thinks it still presents problems for those who wish to upgrade. He recommends the free Windows Vista Upgrade Adviser. Then, be sure to pick the best edition for your use." From the article: "Don't bother wiping your hard disk. Just run the in-place upgrade from your previous installation. You'll be given the option to perform either an Upgrade or Custom (advanced) installation. Opt for the Custom install to clean-install Vista, and Windows Vista Setup does something smart: It creates a folder called Windows.old in your root directory that contains your old Documents and Settings, Program Files and Windows folders. (Note that on my test machine, this added step used an additional 7GB of disk storage.)"
Personally I allocate a partition that's purely dedicated to operating system and software. So in case the OS does a real *uck-up* I won't lose all data and I only have to re-install. The only thing that I'm annoyed with is the "Documents and Settings" directory that is allocated on the OS partition, and I really would like to have the option of reallocating that beast to a different partition.
But of course - you can do it the M$ way and allocate everything in a huge partition and when shit happens you aren't up shit creek, you are up the mother of all shit rivers instead...
A yearly re-installation of Windows seems to be the frequency for me to keep things stable and performing.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This seems to be the popular sentiment, but you will have to eventually. The CIO of my company decides to install vista on his machine. I am responsible for backing up, virus scanning, etc. I took a look at vista and was completely lost. At that moment I knew that if I didnt want to play the fool, I'd better learn this shit. Its an alien feeling to me to sit infront of a machine at work and not instantly know how to do everything. I didn't like that feeling.
I didnt do anything crazy like install it at home (2k 4ever), but I did install it on my main work pc. To tell you the truth, aside from the fact that there are no drivers and many programs no longer work, its not that different from xp. You have to turn all the crap off, change the folders back to classic, etc. After that it pretty much operates like winxp and win2k. Is it worth upgrading a working XP copy? Hell no! Is it worth learning about so that your comfortable? Hell yes.
If you had asked me a month ago if I planned to move to vista I would have laughed circles around you. Well m$ wins again i suppose. Its not all bad though. I rather enjoy "windows mail" the OE replacement. They have moved away from database based (pst/dbx) mail stores and now just dump raw EML files in directories (THANK YOU!!). Its also quite a bit faster than oe and sending and recieving mail. Infact if there was a standalone version, I would probably consider running it on my home machine. It even has a calander so I could finaly move people away from outlook. There is no way we would deploy it across the organization, but its nice to know in 5 years we wont have to have outlook on the machines.
If you fix computers, you will have to learn it eventually. Theres no use delaying the inevitable.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
So it's like Mac OS X's Archive and Install, which we've had since 2002, except it doesn't work as well?
End of Line.
Do you really expect grannys(or Joe sixpack/whatever we are calling typical users this week) to be able to cope with this. How can they cope with picking from mutiple versions (the comparison grid in the article has 27 rows!), downloading software to check that there hardware is compatible and then the install itself.
After all this (again according to the article), they may find that the Windows XP software they buy (or already have) will not work on it. They just want to be able to go to a shop, buy software, and know it will work.
Windows is find for geeks who know it, but the average users is better off with something that works out of the box like MacOS or Ubuntu.
I don't know why people use (insert distro here) I use (insert distro here) and it works great for anyone because (insert distro here) is so easy to use why would anyone use anything else?
To which you will get flaming littleman replies and people will hurl insults left and right as if you insulted their mom.
This argument is carried on with Chevy vs Ford, Catholics vs Protestant, Athiest vs Gnostic, Crunchy vs smooth peanut butter and on and on.
People have opinions, they like to stick to them like a religion, get used to it.
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
How do you know the Reliability Monitor is reliable?