Worth the trouble of upgrading to Windows Vista? Part 2

Let’s pick up where we left off in Part 1 of this series. At this point I have reformated the drive, installed XP sp2, and upgraded to Vista Business Edition. The interface is still very confusing and is going to take several days to get used to. I had to install all of my software and waited until I had Vista up and running.

1. To start with, I installed Live OneCare. Since I started using this several months ago, I have been very satisfied with OneCare. It is definitely one of Microsoft’s better products.
2. I didn’t want to start installing any other software until I had several successful attempts at surfing the web. If you remember, I could do that before the rebuild until the first time I rebooted the computer. So this time I shut down and restarted several different times. Everything seems to be working great.
3. My life could not truly begin again until I got Office Professional 2007 Edition installed, which in my opinion is the greatest product Microsoft ever produced. I started beta testing it back in July and could not imagine my life without it.
4. For surfing, I prefer Firefox over Internet Explorer, which is still playing catch-up.
5. Then I had to make sure that I could run my virtual pc to continuing with evaluating software. I was not happy that Microsoft only has VPC 2007 in Beta. You have to use if you need to run virtual pc and want to run Vista. But they did have that available and it seems to work ok.
6. My job requires that I do a good bit of web development, so I installed VWD and ran it so that it would install the required service pack to run on Vista.
7. The final thing I needed for my job was to get SQL Express 2005 sp2 CTP installed. This completed, I was able to move on to less important issues.

In part 3, I will continue with what I experienced when installing third party software. That was where the real fun came into play.

Part 1 , Part 3