Today I am doing Vista installs on not one, but two machines.
The first is my new Lenovo X60 Tablet (my first Thinkpad ever!) which actually had Vista on it when it arrived. I have been busy installing Microsoft Office 2007, VS2005 with SP1 and the Vista SP1 as well. Because of the Vista install, I had lost all of the built in ThinkPad software, so I'm installing that as well. I'm really excited about this machine - Duo Core, tablet, outdoor display and even touch screen (yes, with my finger! and I have only tried it out minimally, but it's pretty cool.).
But that's the minor job. The big job was updating my Dell Ultra SX280 which originally came with a 40GB drive. This is a very small footprint pc, so had room for only one drive. I used this as my test machine for Visual Studio 2005 (back when we called it Whidbey) through it's alpha and beta stages. Then I repaved it when VS2005 was released and have been using it for all of my VS2005 development since - leaving my other box with some old VB6 and other apps independent.
Because I wanted to move this machine to Vista, I purchased a 300BG drive whch has been sitting in the corner of my office unopened for a few months now. Before doing this job, I wanted to be sure I could still use the existing pc in an emergency. After some research, I learned that Acronis was a great backup system that would also allow me to restore the backup image into a VPC (this requires the Universal Restore add-on with the TrueImage product). While the backup was easy, it took me a while to figure out how to restore into the VPC because I had thought that I needed to backup TO a VPC, and never looked at the various restore instructions. Finally, Michael Campbell set me straight (yet again) about the basic steps I was missing, and I was on my way. I will write up a separate post about that process. But pushing the entire image into a VPC and using the tools from Acronis to do this turned out to be a great solution.
Once I had confirmed that I was able to boot up into the VPC and that my existing system was totally in tact within that VPC, I was ready to turn the box into a Vista computer. It already had 2GB RAM in it and the video card (it's a DVI system) was supposedly ready to support Aero, so I didn't feel quite like the poor PC guy in the Apple ads where he's on his way to the hospital. (I feel so guilty laughing at those ads, but who can help it?)
But my big mistake - or was it? Before doing this I researched the Intel 915G chipset display adapter and came away confident that I would be able to get Aero. This is a slick, fairly new video card. But I couldn't get Aero working and found a few forums with people typing in all-capital angry letters about Intel not supporting Aero on this chipset. Finally I found this confirmation from Intel, which I am surprised I didn't find before. So perhaps, I will have to don a hospital gown, serve up some jello and fork out some cash for a new adapter card after all. Uggh. Luckily resellers like TigerDirect have a way to find Vista compatible graphics cards - remember, though that you want not just Vista, but Vista Aero.
Flipping drives was easy. And doing the installation of Vista simple and quick. What a difference from previous version of Windows. I was able to partition the drive into three 100GB drives as part of the install - very intuitive.
Now I still have to install a LOT of software - besides VS2005 and Office, all of the other tools and 3rd party tools that I use in the course of my development. I will still use my Windows XP computer for my daily life (email, writing, etc) for the time being (or p - as there are hundreds of applications on there and I have no intention of rebuilding that and I also truly believe in repaving and cleaning up a system for an O/S upgrade.
So back to it, since I really had a bunch of real work to do today, but this is a very fun distraction.