Living with Vista: Installation

The install

Installing Vista is a breeze. We pretty much expect nice installs at this point. Put in CD, press a button, and go away for awhile and come back when it's done. Which is what I did.

Welcome to Windows Vista

The first thing you're going to experience when you get into Windows Vista is that it will do a lengthy and thorough analysis of your PC's performance. The idea is for it to determine just how fast your PC is so that it can tune your experience.  But what Microsoft has done with the Vista performance analysis is pretty ingenius. When it's all said and done, you get a number. That's your rating. And that rating can have far reaching consequences.  One can picture a future where games might say "PC rated at 7 or better" rather than a myriad of hardware requirements.  The best ideas are often the most obvious in hindsight.  My Windows Experience Index is a 4.0 on the laptop (processor is a 4.7 but graphics area  4.0).

Those drivers

When you first boot up, it'll begin trying to find drivers for the various devices you have on your computer. This will likely mean sticking in a lot of CDs and hoping they work. I was a little disappointed that more support isn't already in at this stage. My ThinkPad T60's finger print reader wasn't supported for instance.  The Verizon wireless modem wasn't supported.

Living in Vista

One of the reasons to upgrade to Vista is that it's the closest thing to Windows idealized as we've ever gotten. It's a thousand little things that, when combined, make Windows a much better experience. Better dialogs, better usability, and so forth. It's just a much more pleasant environment.

One nice little touch, for example, as a power user is that when I bring up the task manager, it hides all the system processes.  You can see them all with a friendly button called Show processes from all users but for every day use, the task manager is finally useable again.

One thing that annoyed me a bit is that it didn't automatically bring up a list of wireless networks to choose from. So I had to go and set that up manually.

Installing my stuff

At this stage, it's time for me to start installing my stuff.  One of the first things I notice is that most installer dialogs of programs I use are not fully styled by Vista (i.e. have classic buttons).  I'm so used to using WindowBlinds (which skins everything) that it's a bit jarring to see anything using classic buttons.

One of the first programs I install is Multiplicity for Windows Vista. I use Multiplicity because I can then control my XP desktop, my XP laptop and now my Vista laptop from a single keyboard and mouse. It has a single clipboard between the machines so I can quickly copy and paste files and other things to the Vista machine and in turn copy and paste screenshots and such to my XP machine that already has PhotoPaint installed for tweaking photos and then pasted again to my other XP machine where I am using Front Page to write this article....there we go.