***Updated***
Those of you who know me know that when it comes to operating systems I prefer Windows XP Pro over Vista.
Brace yourselves – I’ve decided to switch out my main work computer from XP Pro to Vista Business. Not Jimmy’s system, not Sherry’s system, but my own Little Engine that Could box.
I’ll be documenting the process here – from start to finish. What works. What doesn’t work. The ups, the downs, the best of times, the worst of …well you get the idea.
AND SO IT BEGINS…
I’ve decided to leave my current hard drive intact and install Vista on a completely different drive. This will allow for several things – I can always go back to XP Pro by simply swapping out the drives, and I won’t need to backup 150GB of data prior to doing the install.
Picked up a 500GB drive on the way home – fairly large upgrade from the current 150GB drive.
SO WHICH VERSION OF VISTA…
Vista comes in many flavors, from the Home Basic on up to Ultimate and several in between. I’ve decided to go with Vista Ultimate 64. The 64 denotes the 64-bit version. What does that mean? The biggest thing it means is that you can load up a system with RAM! RAM is cheap these days, and more RAM = Happy Computer.
STAY TUNED…
Tomorrow the journey begins – the new drive will be installed and we begin the Vista Ultimate 64 install.
*UPDATE – THE INSTALLATION*
So this morning I began the installation. Prior to doing anything I made a list of all of the ‘must have’ programs that were installed under XP – things like MS Office, Quickbooks, LogMeIn, Mozy Backup and so on.
I removed the existing hard drive (containing XP Pro) from the system and replaced with the new 500GB drive. While the original drive did not *have* to be removed, the ‘better safe than sorry’ phrase came to mind.
I also doubled the RAM, from 2GB to 4GB, put the cover back on the box, plugged it back in and powered up.
The intial installation phase was surprisingly fast and easy – boot to the Vista DVD and follow the prompts. Entered the CD Key and let it go to town. It took all of 15 minutes for the 1st phase, which required a reboot.
The 2nd phase consisted of Vista scanning the system looking for devices – this took 4 minutes.
The 3rd and final phase of initial setup was creating a user account and password and setting the time zone, which took all of 2 minutes.
Vista was installed from start to finish in under 30 minutes – impressive!
Even more impressive was what I found when I logged in for the 1st time – On a standard XP Pro installation, after the initial install of the Operating System one must then install drivers for audio, video, network card, system board, and so on. Not with Vista – after the 1st login the system was up and online, it had installed the proper drivers for the network card, video card, the audio, everything! I didn’t have to download or install a single solitary driver.
There were several updates for Vista which downloaded automatically in a matter of minutes, and I went ahead with their install. This was the one step in the whole process that caused me a moment or two of concern – the updates (there were 35) took quite a bit of time to install, about 35 minutes.
After the updates were done the system rebooted, and the left monitor (I have two monitors on the system) showed the mouse cursor, which I could move around, but everything else was completely black. I waited a few minutes then rebooted the system again, at which time it came up normally. I haven’t experienced the black screen again.
Now it was time to install software – Installed Microsoft Office 2007 Enterprise and Office 2007 Service Pack 1, downloaded and installed AVG 8.5 antivirus, Quickbooks 2009 Pro, MozyPro online backup and a few other applications.
Every single application installed flawlessly – no errors, no hangups, no issues with Vista 64, nothing.
We utilize an off-site Exchange server for our email. Configuration of Outlook took all of 30 seconds. Plugged in Exchange server name, entered my login ID and password and bam! There was all of my email, calendar and contacts. Easy peasy.
Next came the printer – I have a Brother MFC 7820N unit – it’s a black and white laser printer/fax/scanner that is connected to the computer via a USB cable. This was my single biggest concern out of the whole process of swapping over to Vista – I have experienced so many issues with printers/scanners and vista and wasn’t sure what to expect.
The printer had been purchased a year ago, and came with a Vista CD. I popped in the CD, followed the prompts and 5 minutes later had a fully functional printer/scanner/fax. I can scan directly to the hard drive with zero issues.
Next came accessing data on other office systems running XP and allowing others to access data on this box.
I was able to map a drive to our front desk system with minimal effort – browsed the network, chose the system and data share and that was that.
I set up a 2nd login on the Vista system for Jimmy and Sherry to use when accessing data I’ve shared. I copied over the data from the original hard drive, created the share then simply browsed out to the Vista box from Jimmy and Sherry’s systems, provided the user ID and password and they were in.
I’ll have a chance to utilize the system all day tomorrow and really take it for a test drive.
**UPDATE – FINAL THOUGHTS**
I’ve had a chance to use Vista for a couple of days now, and bottom line is it has worked out much better than anticipated.
Out of all of the applications that I use, only one (Malwarebytes Antimalware) is not 100% compatible with Vista-64. Truecrypt, Quickbooks 2009 and our printer/scanner/fax all work flawlessly. Not a single error encountered.
-Daniel Scurlock
Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC