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Vista Installation Shock - it's easy
A confession: despite writing about Vista on and off for the last year or so I did not, until last night, actually own a Vista computer. My work and home desktop PCs both worked well with Windows XP Professional and my Media Center seemed happy with XP MCE 2005, so I left all three alone and simply used a Vista notebook whenever I needed to check software or try out Vista's features.
Of course, this had to end at some point - and that point was my desktop PC beginning to slow down alarmingly and crash. Forced to reinstall Windows, I dithered - was it best to stick with the familiar face of XP, even if it meant upgrading again in the near future, or try Vista? In the end I decided to take the plunge with the new OS and, much to my surprise, it proved to be a great decision.
It turns out installing Windows Vista is easy - as long as you have a decent mobile phone.
Before starting I copied all my documents, photos, music and emails to an external hard disk, deactivated my software and removed an ancient PCI wireless network card that would clearly never work with Vista (it barely worked with XP). Out went two ancient and noisy IDE hard disks, and in went a 400GB SATA one. I also downloaded a few essentials (AVG antivirus, Zone Alarm firewall, Firefox and Thunderbird) onto the same external disk ready for use. Finally, I crossed my fingers and booted from the Vista DVD.
The installer started, hummed away for a bit and demanded a license number. At this point I hit the first and only real snag: Vista didn't like the SATA hard disk as it uses something called "GPT", and wouldn't go any further. With no idea what GPT even stood for, let alone why it should thwart installation given that Vista could quite clearly read the disk and see a partition, I was stumped. Fortunately, a quick google via my mobile phone turned up a quick solution (here, for anyone interested). Vista could then repartition and reformat the disk ready for use - so far so good.
Sadly, this wasn't quite the only problem. With the new partition formatted Vista still wouldn't install, claiming that the motherboard couldn't boot from it. This didn't sound right, as the BIOS was detecting the disk with no problems, but I tried disabling the old IDE hard disk controller just in case - happily this did the trick, and re-running the installer set the installation in progress again. After half an hour or so the PC rebooted into Vista.
Much to my surprise, Vista didn't have any huge problems with any of my rather esoteric hardware - I needed a driver for my Creative sound card, but other than that Windows Update found all the needed files without prompting. My applications installed first time, and even the new wireless network card didn't cause too much trouble once the manufacturer's pesky management utility had been disabled. After an hour or so downloading 45 Windows updates and another hour copying back all my documents and emails, the PC was back and ready to use.
So, what did I learn? A few things:
- Installing Vista, even on fairly old hardware, can be surprisingly simple
- .. but always try to have an alternative means of checking the web to hand when reinstalling Windows
- The GPT disk problem can be quickly and easily fixed via command line
- Replacing two old hard disks with one new one is a great way to cut noise
- If you own a rather fluffy cat the inside of your PC's case will fill with an alarming amount of grey cat hair. This is disgusting, but is easily fixed with a hoover.
But, most importantly, I learnt that installing Vista is actually easier than installing Windows XP. Why?
- Vista requires less intervention. It's largely a silent process.
- Vista works with SATA disks - no more finding a floppy disk drive, then finding a floppy disk, then finding SATA drivers and combining the three in order to install Windows
- Vista's installer can actually partition disks - although some of the more advanced features, such as cleaning the boot record, do need command line access
All in all, after about four hours of work I now have a Vista PC that runs quickly and seems perfectly happy - it even runs Windows XP Pro inside Virtualbox. Would I recommend taking the plunge and upgrading to Vista? Yes. Am I looking forward to installing Service Pack 1? Not really.
Posted by Tom Royal on March 26, 2008 | Permalink
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Comments
Apart from having little support for older hardware, Vista so far doesn't seem too problematic to me. Tell you what though, search the net for Puppy Linux, you have to do partitions yourself but apart from that it installs in about 10 minutes :|
Posted by: Darth Tommy V | Mar 26, 2008 4:55:25 PM
Oh, and service pack one doesn't seem to do much, but it doesn't make anything worse :D
Posted by: Darth Tommy V | Mar 26, 2008 5:00:46 PM
