June 16, 2007

Installing Windows Vista

Posted by Ben Simo

I have not yet made the jump to Windows Vista on any of my personal machines.

We have installed Vista on some machines in the test lab where I work. When we started playing with a Vista beta, Vista was not allowed on our network but our customers were using Vista; demanding that we test our products on Vista. There were numerous technical and political battles that had to be fought to get Vista installed in our test lab.

We quickly discovered that Microsoft's minimum system requirements are just the minimum to install the OS. I can't imagine any user being happy with Vista on a machine that just met the minimum requirements.

We encountered incompatible DVD drives from a major PC manufacturer. We followed Microsoft's instructions for copying the DVD to a hard drive for installation from the hard drive instead of the DVD only to have the Vista install inform us that it cannot be installed as Microsoft instructed.

We've had to call Microsoft for permission to reinstall failed installations.

I have decided that I do not need this trouble at home. I have not yet seen any feature worth the upgrade. I would rather not have to buy new hardware. For now, I am going to stick with Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Linux.

For those that really want to make the leap, I suggest you watch the following video to see what kind of machine is compatible with Vista ... or is it?


Vista install in 2 minutes

Please let me know how your install goes.

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1 Comment:

June 17, 2007  
Anonymous wrote:

While my bias leans towards Microsoft I wouldn't say I'm a true supporter, I can bemoan their products with the best of them. But I will say this; Microsoft has a vendor certification process and a Vista certified list of hardware suppliers and the components that are available. They never guaranteed that the OS would work on any and every machine. The onus is on the vendor to provide Vista-compatible drivers. This is why the minimum requirements don't name names. Not just for Microsoft products but any and all software these days save for graphics controllers and processors which fall under two camps Intel/AMD and ATI/Nvidia and even then that doesn't imply those specific vendors in the case of the graphics controllers.