I'll Jump On The Bandwagon Soon Enough

My colleague Scot Finnie has been giving Windows Vista a very detailed and extremely critical (as in, he's found fault with things) shakedown ever since the first builds appeared for public consumption.  With the final release candidate looming, it's about time I got my hands on it, turned it upside down and emptied its pockets to see what falls out.  The only reason I haven't done this sooner is resources: I don't have a spare machine to do testing on (yet), and I really wanted to not run the risk of trashing my production system on something that has been explicitly branded a beta.

I've gathered advice about the installation process from other folks who have suffered through it, though, and here are a few things I plan to take to heart:

1. Don't upgrade.  Meaning, don't upgrade an existing installation of Windows.  Install clean.  You will drastically minimize the number of variables involved, and you'll be able to systematically determine what works in a clean install vs. what doesn't.  Yes, this means more headache spread out over more time, but it also means a clearer picture of why things might work or not work.
2. Don't install with anything that doesn't absolutely have to be there.  Unplug everything you don't need to get Windows running before the install; you'll save a lot of time on the hardware detection process, and you'll be able to add hardware progressively and see what works and what doesn't.  Hardware drivers are still a big missing piece of the Vista puzzle, and from what I can tell there will be many things that will simply not work, period.  My scanner, for instance (a Canon consumer-level item) isn't going to be supported at all, so I either have to plug it into an existing XP system or buy a whole new one.  The former is workable; the latter is absolutely not happening right now.
3. Don't install on a drive with an existing Windows installation.  Even if you're doing a parallel install, don't do this.  I have a separate drive that I've reserved for Vista, which I will boot to entirely apart from XP.  (At this point I'm even leery of having Vista examine my existing non-boot drives until I can determine that it doesn't create incompatibilities with earlier versions of Windows in NTFS.  Yes, I'm probably being paranoid, but You Never Know...)
4. Don't trust production work to it for the time being.  I'm even leery of doing so after the initial gold release, if only because I need to keep my main system an XP system for the time being, just for the sake of my work.  Maybe after the first 6-8 months I'll be dual-booting consistently (or using Virtual PC for backwards compatibility, etc.), but I don't plan on going whole-hog anytime soon.

Old habits are hard to break, and I hope the best thing about Vista is that it gives me a bunch of solid, compelling reasons to leave XP behind.  Maybe not immediately, but in time.  And I'm patient.