Rob's Blog

Vista Upgrade

After a week of using Vista, my advice is to hold off upgrading until Service Pack 1 gets released. Vista in it’s current state seems to be a complete mess.

I upgraded to Vista today. What a mistake! Now, my laptop is one of the most standard machines you can get; Intel Centrino certified, it’s got the most standard chipset, graphics card and so on you could imagine. I’ve got 2Gb of RAM and a 128Mb ATI graphics card – yet Vista still managed to mess things up. Four reboots it took for the upgrade, which is pretty sucky. Even forgiving the reboots the operating system wasn’t able to find my wireless networking card – despite it being a very common Intel wireless card. I’d say there’s a fair number of laptops out there with this card.

But the fun wasn’t over. Despite Vista’s upgrade advisor saying I only needed to change four applications I got a blue screen after startup. Happily I work in IT and I could work out the problem – traced back to Adobe’s Acrobat Reader 7. Upgrading to Acrobat Reader 8 fixed the problem, but as with all previous versions of Acrobat Reader, Adobe seem to be intent on forcing ads and making the application look pretty. I’m not quite sure what the real functional differences between AR5 and the new AR8 actually are; I’m sure there are some differences in the PDF file format but the application seems to change more often than Rafa Bentiez’s Liverpool team.

Conclusion? I’d highly recommend not buying Vista and if you do – don’t upgrade, do a fresh install if you can. I’d say it’s best to wait for at least SP1 (as most sensible businesses will be doing, including mine) and if you must run Vista, run it in a virtual machine.

N.B.: Microsoft’s new EULA apparently prohibits the use of most versions of Vista in a Virtual Machine. I’ve no idea if this would be enforcable – I know as it stands Vista works perfectly in VMware even though they say it’s not allowed – nor do I know if it would actually be able to stand up in a court of law. I don’t particularly fancy finding out though.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 4:16 am and is filed under Hardware. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.