First of all the machine I’m using is a fairly beefy machine, an AMD 4200 dual core with 2GB of RAM and a hefty nVidia 7800 graphics card. The upgrade took about 2 hours from inserting the CD to being back to (almost) full productivity.

The first issue I encountered was in the network configuration. The machine uses a WiFi card to talk to my router and somehow the default gateway in the TCP/IP settings had gotten screwed up. I fixed this and the network was back to normal.

Another problem I had (which has since resolved itself) was that my printer (an HP PhotoSmart 7550) no longer worked due to the lack of driver support. Since the Vista launch the Printer has somehow started working again although I don’t recall installing a new driver. Presumably Windows Update did something to enable usage of the existing driver.

I also had to un-install Nero Burning ROM for some reason. No big deal.

Lastly I had to uninstall Semantic Anti-Virus as I was running an older version (ver9) and it’s not allowed to run under Vista.

Over the last few weeks I’ve encountered a number of popup windows through the course of normal PC usage.  Here they are, some are sort of funny. This is not a complete list as in certain cases you cannot take a screen-grab of the popup.

I turned User Access Control off after a number of popups. I think I’ll turn it back on maybe. Let’s see.

The main issue I have now is that when my PC resumes from being asleep, the machine locks up for a good 60 to 120 seconds. It’s weird, the machine starts back quite fast with no visible problems, you can launch an application and click around etc. but within about 30seconds the machine will lock up and you cannot do anything. After 2mins or so the machine comes back. I’ve no idea what’s happening there. I’ve checked the Event Log to see what’s taking the time but have come up empty.
 
The other issue I have is the resolution. I run at 1680×1024 with fonts enlarged to 125%. This means some of my type is fine whereas some of the windows are artificially enlarged. Since I’m running on an LCD screen this means certain parts of the UI are not displayed at the screen’s native resolution and hence appear blurry. This REALLY sucks but I’ve learned to deal with it. Hopefully an update to the nVidia drivers or firmware will fix this.

In the plus column, I’ve been running for a full two months now with no anti-virus software on my machine and have not had a single virus problem (knock on wood). This is definitely something I would not have tried on XP.

Lastly, yesterday I ordered my first hard drive with Perpendicular Storage, it arrived today with free shipping (gotta love NewEgg). Tonight I’ll swap out the current drive and start over from scratch with a clean install. Hopefully that will solve all my problems.

Incredibly frustrated with various events of the day, I decided to take matters into my own hands and install the Feb CTP of Vista on my home PC. Unfortunately Vista CTP doesn’t play that nice with VPC 2004 at least on my machine. Some others have had the same problem.

So I installed Virtual PC server 2005. This thing installed in less than 1 minute and I was left with an open browser containing a URI to my own machine. Where’s the client I asked. It took me about 30 seconds to realize the entire thing is browser based!!! Seconds later I was up and running the Vista install on my PC, within a browser. Imagine Virtual PC 2004 combined with Remote Desktop or VNC and tossed into a browser. That’s Virtual PC 2005 R2.

So far so good, Vista is installing (slowly). The other nice thing about this is you can close the browser and the virtual machine keeps running in the background.

About two weeks ago I was in Redmond and met with a number of folks from the Infocard team as well as Office 2007. Looking forward to getting my hands dirty with some of this stuff many days from now when the install finishes…