Well after suggesting to clients that if their hardware supports it they should upgrade to Vista in the next little while… I actually made the move myself last night! I have been using Vista Ulitmate on my new Asus laptop now since the end of December and other than a few issues have been ok. I finally put together my new PC based on an Intel Core 2 Duo to use as my primary PC. When I built the machine the plan was to install XP Pro, install applications then move data. Eventually I was going to go to Vista. Last night I had a thought that this was going to require probably a second imaging of the machine so I decided to upgrade the fairly new XP to Vista Business. The new machine was spec’d with Vista in mind so I knew running it wouldn’t be a problem and the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor confirmed that for almost everything. One piece of bundled software was not supported and may cause a problem but that was about it.
The Upgrade Process
I popped in my Windows Vista Bsiness upgrade disk and indicated that I wanted to upgrade. After answering a few questions, it was ready so I let it go on. About an hour later Vista Business was installed. Hmmm after the first log in I noticed that I had no sound and that there was no sound card installed. This is a fairly new Intel motherboard with the 965 chipset so I knew it wasn’t old legacy hardware. I checked Intels site and there was a Vista Driver for my integrated sound card. Download it and install, no problems yet, reboot…. Still no sound device. Try Windows Update and nothing.
At about this time I also decided that I wanted to try the Vista anytime upgrade process. I was planning on putting Vista Ultimate on this PC anyway. This is a new feature with Vista. Since the OS upgrade is distributed on a DVD, every version is on the disk. Installation is controlled by your product key. I visited the web site from my other PC (http://windowsanytimeupgrade.com) selected my upgrade (Business to Ulitmate), input my credit card information and was sent to a link to download a file to my PC to start the upgrade. Since I had an anytime upgrade disk, I copied the file to my Vista PC and ran it. I got prompted to put my disk in and about an hour later, Vista Ultimate was now on my machine. But still I had no sound! BTW anytime upgrade is only available if you are running a version if Vista on your PC, you can not use it to upgrade XP to Vista.
After Googling my sound problems. I finally found a post that had a solution. It had to unistall my sound card from device manager, reinstall the Vista Drivers, reboot, then from device manager update the drivers and indicate to install them from my pc. I tried it and sound was back!
I still have some devices that will not work with Vista but not many. All of my printers (except my Canon CP220 photo printer) had Vista drivers available to some degree. HP has still not come up with netwrk drivers for my networked 7210 all in one so the scanning functionality only works via the web interface. My Quicken XG 2006 needed a couple of tweaks (run as admin and XP SP 2 compatibilty, shame on you Intuit Canada). I am disappointed with Microtek as they currently do not have drivers for my Scanmaker 4800 scanner and don’t plan support, in fact they will not have drivers for their current products till June of 07. Not good! I haven’t yet tried hooking up some of these devices but I will and then try to figure out if there is some sort of workaround.
For applications that just don’t behave under Vista, I will be using MS Virtual PC 2007 (see my next post). I will be setting up an XP SP2 VM and installing those applications on there. There is limited hardware support but at least thiey will be able to run.
For the most part after a day I have been happy. I like the new Aero interface and wnat to go with the security features of Vista. Stay tuned as I will post more problems and solutions as I come upon them.
Stephen
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