After a great deal of preparation and work, I've finally taken the plunge and migrated to Windows Vista on my desktop machine. I'm still getting many of my common applications set up, but it's been a lot less painful than I thought it would be.
Well, okay -- the experience was a bit rocky at first. I tried the 64-bit edition of Vista and after discovering that my printer and my scanner were totally unsupported, I groaned and fell back to the 32-bit edition, where everything worked perfectly. Since I only have 2GB of memory in this computer anyway, and no 32-bit apps that exist in 64-bit incarnations, the advantages aren't really that obvious. I suspect my next PC will be 64-bit from "stem to stern", including the OS -- and maybe by that time I'll have devices that will have proper driver support.
There's three basic ways you can install Vista on a new PC.
- Clean install. Format the partition and start over with Vista. Probably the best option, but also the one that requires the most work.
- Upgrade an existing XP installation, apps and all. This is my least favorite option, because there's just so much that can go wrong with an upgrade, even though the installer will flag possible compatibility issues.
- Install Vista to an existing Windows partition without upgrading or formatting. This moves your old Windows files to a directory called Windows.old, along with the Documents and Settings directories from the old installation. You'll need plenty of disk space to get away with this particular option, but I had the space, so I decided to go for it and found that it worked out really well.
I'll be posting more installments to the XP User's Guide to Vista as time presents itself.
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