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Microsoft Windows
Vista
I tried to wait. Honest, I
did...
I had been determined to wait while the inevitable initial bugs
were worked out before installing Windows Vista, but I succumbed
early and took the leap on February 2, 2007. Picked up a
copy of Vista Ultimate at my local Staples retail store along
with a DVD drive (actually, an "I/O Magic Internal Double
Layer DVD Rewritable Drive with Lightscribe", Model no.
IDVD16DLS) and went to work on it that same evening. Ah,
Christmas in February! Boxes to open; new toys to play
with!
Herewith follows a few of the things I have learned over the
past few days:
a) You can't get there from here.
Already running Windows XP Pro or Windows 2000? If so,
you won't be able to do an "upgrade" installation of Windows
Vista Home Basic or Home Premium. Whether for "technical
reasons" as some have said or for marketing purposes, the good
people at Microsoft have decided to not allow backwards upgrades
from a Professional/business edition of XP to a home edition of
Vista.
So, if you are running XP Pro and absolutely want to do an
upgrade installation, you'll need to purchase either Windows
Vista Business or Vista Ultimate. Otherwise, buy Home
Basic or Home Premium and you'll be forced to do a clean
install.
b) Outlook 2002 and Windows Vista don't play nice
together.
Outlook 2002 (which was sold standalone and also as part of
Office XP), shows its age by developing problems with memory
loss under Vista. The first time I ran OL 2002 after the
Vista upgrade, I was forced to re-enter the previously stored
passwords for each of the many mail accounts I routinely
monitor. I dutifully did so, being sure to check the "Save
this password" box, and all was well. Until the next time
I started Outlook, that is, when I had to repeat the
password-entry procedure. And repeat. And repeat.
After hours of testing and research, I have come to the
conclusion that Windows Vista has updated the "Protected Storage
System Provider" in ways which make it incompatible with OL 2002
(and previous versions?). Since OL 2002 (and Office XP)
have reached the end of their
LifeCycle, I suspect this won't be fixed anytime soon.
c) Save $230 (or thereabouts) when you buy multiple
copies of Windows Vista for your home!
I was both happy and somewhat annoyed when I stumbled upon
this "little" tidbit while browsing Vista support newsgroups.
Happy because it saved me a chunk of money; annoyed because I
don't think it's fair that most people will never even know
about this opportunity.
Buy one retail copy of Windows
Vista Ultimate at the best price you can find, then visit this
Microsoft site and purchase one or two activation keys for
Windows Vista Home Premium for just $49.99 each! At
current pricing and taking into account state sales taxes, that
worked out to a $230 savings for me. And - talk about
instant gratification - there's no need to download anything nor
wait for shipping, just use the Vista Ultimate installation
media along with the new activation keys included with the sales
receipt.
That's correct. Mr. Gates is offering this spectacular
deal as a "Limited time offer" - I have no idea how long this
will last, but it is still in effect as of this writing, February
5, 2007. (Update:
It's still there on June 10, 2007)
d) If you are performing an "In-Place" Vista install
(we used to call it an "upgrade" as opposed to a "clean" or
"new" install), be sure to update your antivirus to a
Vista-compatible version before installing the new
operating system.
Believe me, you'll be glad you did.
As of 04Feb2007, the current release of AVG Anti-Virus Free
Edition seems unable to load it's "Resident Shield" component
under Windows Vista.
Grisoft is
aware of the problem and has promised a fix.
Also as of 04Feb2007, Symantec is offering a free update from
various "2006" products to their 2007 equivalents.
Check it out.
e) Video cards and their drivers. Grrr....
Before installing any version of Vista, take a few minutes to
visit your video card manufacturer's website and get the latest
scoop on Vista compatibility and drivers.
Also, if you want to get all of the benefits of the Aero
interface and you crave snappy video performance, consider
swapping out any video card with less than 256MB of video ram.
I swapped my
ATI All-In-Wonder Radeon 9600XT (128 MB ram) for a
PNY GeForce 7600 GS with 512 MB and am very pleased
with the difference in performance.
f) Speaking of video cards, forget about watching TV with
any ATI All-In-Wonder card and Windows Vista. Grrrrrr....
I might have been willing to hang onto my ATI All-In-Wonder
Radeon 9600XT card for the sake of it's TV tuner, but it simply
does not work in Windows Vista. The graphics side of the
card works fine (albeit more slowly than I would have liked),
but the tuner is not recognized by Vista at all. From what
I have gathered, none of the cards in the All-In-Wonder product
line have functional TV under Vista and ATI (now AMD) is
reported to have no intention of fixing this problem to the
great consternation of many owners.
g) One is good, 3 is better!
Officially, Windows Vista Home Basic requires 512 MB of
system memory, with all other Vista versions recommending 1 GB (click
for details).
My system was running XP Pro and doing well with 1 GB, but
after upgrading to Vista Ultimate I could see the old familiar
signs of a memory-starved operating system: slow switching
between apps, unreasonably long load times when starting apps,
and so on.
Adding another 2 GB (thus a total of 3 GB of system memory)
made an immediate and very noticeable improvement, though I
expect that I would have done just as well by adding just 1 GB.
Either way, as always, you should consider Microsoft's
"recommended" or "suggested" values as the barely-acceptable
minimum.
h) Permissions, permissions. A new field for
Windows support personnel.
A friend called to say that after installing
Vista he could no longer get Adobe's Photoshop CS (v8.0) to
start up. The error message, as displayed below, begins,
"Could not initialize Photoshop because the file is locked."
It took a few minutes to figure out that the
quickest way to resolve this issue was to simply right-click the
Photoshop desktop icon (or the "Photoshop" Start menu entry, or
the "Photoshop.exe" file itself) and select "Run as
administrator" from the context menu.
It's a quick and dirty fix, but it solves the
problem and is unlikely to have any real security impact on his
PC.
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