Worth the trouble of upgrading to Windows Vista? Part 1

I have heard a great deal of complaints in regards to trying to successfully upgrade to Microsoft Windows Vista. And even more that you don’t get any benefits out of it that would make it worth the trouble. My opinion is that it is not worth the trouble if you are happy with your installation of XP. But if you have just started on XP, then you should considering upgrading now. I will detail issues that I had when upgrading and issues that I have had since that time.

I keep 4 computers at all times to meet all my personal and professional needs. The Gateway CS200X tablet was the one I had decided to upgrade first, as it is the one I use the most. That was probably my biggest mistake, using the PC that I use the most. Because of the work I do, I use alot of different software, so I had to assure that what I use would work with Vista. So to start I put the Vista Business Upgrade CD in my drive and ran the upgrade advisory. The report came back that I would have to uninstall only 1 application which was part of my NeroCD burning suite. Also, that the video card I had would not allow me to get the full benefit of the Aero experience. There were several applications that were reported as having possible issues after upgrading. But I decided I would go for it.

Before doing the installation, I made sure that I backed up all my important files. Don’t make the mistake some people do and assume that their files are safe. You should be backing up your files on a regular basis. I use Live OneCare builtin backup utility for performing that task. At this point I felt like I was on the safe side even if things went wrong. It was time to start the upgrade process.

After the upgrade process was completed, which took about 2 hours I started exploring Vista. Here are some things that I found.

• I had always logged in with the administrator account in XP. As I am the only user and work from home, I never saw a need to use any other account. After installing Vista, I could no longer access the administrator account and all my personalize settings were now gone.
• During a project I was working on, I had to create an account to bypass some authentication issues on the customer network. Microsoft was nice enough to decide that it would use that account as the primary account. I had forgot I had ever created the account, so this gave me about 2 hours of grief trying to determine what the password for the account was.
• After finally finding the password, I was able to get in only to find that the interface is very unfriendly. It wasn’t just that it was so different from the Windows XP desktop, but just very difficult. When Microsoft first introduced XP, it took some time to get used to where to find things, but it was a great step forward. Over the years I have used a number of Operating Systems and feel that MS has taken a few steps backwards in the ‘Ease of Use’ arena. I will admit that Vista looks very clean and crisp and is far ahead of its competitors in that respect. But most users will spend several days trying to find their way around. There are several of my customers that I am suggesting not upgrading to Vista any time soon. It will just be to traumatic to them on the learning curve.
• The issues I had with my wireless network was enough to make me want to throw the computer in the trash. It worked for 1 whole day until I rebooted the thing. After that, I could never get the wireless to work. I could connect to the network and access anything on my network, but I could never get back out to the internet. I turned off all firewalls and Virus Protection and was still not able to keep a steady connection. For me, this was the worst possible situation that could have arose.
• Microsoft Live OneCare is my choice of Virus protection. I believed that I was running the most current release, but was forced to upgrade the software upon the completion of the Vista upgrade.
• When evaluating software, I will generally install it on a Virtual Machine. For that, I run Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2004, only to discover that it would no longer run on Vista. Luckily MS has a beta version of Virtual PC 2007, which I promptly downloaded.
• One of my primary responsibilities is database development on SQL server. For me, I have been an advid fan of MSSQL since version 7. I do run the SQL 2005 Standard on my development server, but have been running SQL 2005 Express on my tablet. I had to download and install SQL 2005 sp2 CTP to continue my use of SQL 2005 Express.
• For web development Visual Web Developer is my IDE of choice when it comes to ASP.NET. But in order to continue using it, I had to download a service pack.

But I still had the problem of not being able to get my wireless card to allow me to access the internet. After several hours of googling and speaking with some friends, I decided that it would be best if I just reformatted the harddrive and install a fresh copy of XP, then install Vista.

In part 2, I will continue with what I experienced after the rebuild.

Part 2, Part 3