Alright so by now most of you or all of you have, have tried, want to try, at least thought about getting; Windows Vista. Well I decided to update my latest rig with Windows Vista thanks to our good friends at Dell for giving it away for free… ANYWAY I Digress. Here we go with what I think so far as my initial thoughts on Windows Vista!

I started the process of doing the upgrade last night around 10:30pm, it didn’t finish until around 1:30-2am. First thing I did though was read a little bit about 32bit vs 64bit since both versions are on the disc. Now I know I should have installed the 64bit version but alas I don’t have a seperate partition right now on this machine to do a nice clean install without losing all the info I have on here… fair enough I can deal with the 32bit version!

The installation went smoothly and without any incidents until right around the end. Thats when the following message appeared on my screen!

“We were unable to start windows — a recent hardware or software change could have caused the problem. Please reboot and try again”

Well… yeah I’d say there was a pretty f’n big software change!

However it was just a glitch with my BIOS it appeared and had nothing to do with Windows Vista’s installation! Thankfully! So Vista starts up for me right away. First thing everyone notices is that Windows Vista is DAMNED PRETTY. Aero does a fantastic job of making you feel like you’re not running Windows — at first. Once you’re past the Winmac feel of the OS you realize nothing has really changed drastically. Which is alright by me so far.

There are some downfalls though I have noticed. First things is make damned sure that you have new hardware including soundcards. SBLive! isn’t supported by Vista at all so don’t even expect to hear anything but the most obnoxious sound EVER come out of your speakers. So I switched to my onboard sound which does the job for now. The next thing is Windows Media Player 11 — now I had it on XP and absolutely loved the hell out of it. It worked well and played my mp3’s and kept them nice and organized. That made me very happy! For some reason the VISTA version of Windows Media Player likes to skip constantly and take 20 seconds when manually switching between songs… could be a setting or something but I doubt it. I’ll keep you updated about that one!

Another thing I have noticed for the good is that the Auto Update works quickly, and gives you a good choice of things to update or not to update, no real difference from XP but that’s okay.

Now being I’m very cell phone oriented I had to know if my Blackberry would be able to Sync properly with my Windows Vista being that according to RIM it’s not supposed to. Well I have good news everyone — you can Sync, Backup, Restore, and do everything you desire your Blackberry to do with little to no problems. The only thing you may need to do is re-setup the RIM Virtual Serial Port as that for some reason does not carry over to Vista during your upgrade! (Leave a comment if you’d like help on doing this!)

Now for you Guitar Players out there — if you use Cakewalk Guitar Pro 3 to do your recordings make sure that you have everything setup properly to recognize your new (old) sound card because getting it to recognize your onboard sound card is a chore if you can get it to recognize it at all! (I had to uninstall then open Guitar Pro — have it look for a soundcard and not find it, then reinstall then have Guitar Pro search again! Not too bad!)

Overall after only a few hours with Vista so far I can’t say I am really hurt by it, or feel let down at all. A Few minor setbacks didn’t cause any problems over all. Old programs worked well and it runs smooth and very fast.

Just make sure you have a pretty kicking system to take full advantage of all the graphic features and everything! I’ll keep you update if I find anything else that is horribly filled with hate!

System Used To Test:
Dell XPS410
Intel Core 2 Duo Extreme @ 2.50mhz
4 Gigs of Ram