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.)"

Re:Why install Vista?

[darth_MALL]

Way to post a hilarious (and fresh) comment and no alternative solution. Comedy Gold.

On the other hand

[Z00L00K]

By doing a clean install of an operating system you will get rid of all junk files and junk data that tends to accumulate over time and degrade the performance of the system.

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.

Re:Downgrade Advisor

[Anonymous Coward]

but I do need its enhanced reliability

what makes you think Vista is more reliable? all trolling aside, you cant guage the reliability of anything until it's been on the market for a while.

some people have to bother

[crabpeople]

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.

Re:Be careful with in-place upgrade

[hawaiian717]

So it's like Mac OS X's Archive and Install [apple.com], which we've had since 2002, except it doesn't work as well?

best tip

[Anonymous Coward]

The best tip for upgrading to Vista is "Dont" upgrade to Vista.

Don't bother

[HomelessInLaJolla]

As I was reading TFA [computerworld.com] I followed this link to an article about the new GUI [computerworld.com] complete with screenshots.

After viewing the screenshots I've determined that most of the new features in Vista are a rehash of the same graphical tools that sysadmins have been using for years--except now they're brushed up with Apple polish and included on mass market consumer m0dels. The vast majority of the population won't ever care about or use them. The desktop seems to be the MS edition of Sun's Looking Glass whose capabilities have come to fruition in the free software realm through Gnome, Enlightenment, Beryl, and KDE.

The question I have is: what is really new and improved in Vista?

The progression from Win95, through 98, through 2k, through ME, through XP, to Vista is like reading a flame war between two contestants who never give up: each revision expands on the previous base to produce a progressively larger work. To be fair current GNU/Linux offerings seem to be inheriting the same progressive bloat though not to the same extent. Unlike flame war contestants, though, OS designers are supposed to look for ways to streamline the final product and deliver top performance with maximum efficiency. While Vista has (by screenshots) top performance it isn't much further ahead of free software for the millions which MS has spent preparing it.

In conclusion I'll definitely agree: Don't bother.

Is Windows ready for the desktop?

[the_womble]

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.

Re:Downgrade Advisor

[COMON$]

must be a hundred posts exactly like yours a day. Let me simplify the argument so you don't start one again.

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.

Re:Downgrade Advisor

[cheater512]

How do you know the Reliability Monitor is reliable?

Re:Downgrade Advisor

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it has the word "reliability" right in its name... it must be reliable.

Re:Downgrade Advisor

[rtb61]

People currently like Ubuntu, because they currently like Ubuntu. I like Ubuntu at this time, I am still running two different versions of Suse on other computers.

If I was running a server and wanted to contract out the admin, I would probably go with Red Hat, because you can currently in Australia get a larger range of contractors with the skills to properly administer it.

Believe it or not it is all penguin cool, freedom of choice and all that stuff. So Ubuntu, is currently winning in the Linux desktop stakes, and from their web page "Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'Humanity to others', or 'I am what I am because of who we all are'. The Ubuntu distribution brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the software world", makes it a bit more fun and a bit more in spirit.

Not that you need to use it, so feel free to mentally substitute the distribution of your choice where ever you see the words, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu or Xbuntun be that Red Hat, Suse, Debian Gnu Linux etc. please go here if I left your preferred version out http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major [distrowatch.com] and many apologise for being a bit 'slack~ware' and not writing down every Linux distribution available today.