More on Vista

Time finally permitted, so I decided to take another stab at installing and running Vista on my laptop. This go around, I decided to do a completely clean install (blow partitions, format and install from scratch) rather than upgrade XP. My system is an IBM ThinkPad G40 with 768MB of RAM and a 40GB HDD.

 Vista installed much faster as a clean install than it did as an upgrade. The whole installation took about a bit more than an hour. As expected, it did not recognize my wireless card, so I made sure that I had the CD handy in order to install the driver (I know from my upgrade experience that the XP driver works under Vista). Since I was not going to be able to retain my applications, I decided to scale back to just the necessities: Palm Desktop, Macromedia MX 2004 Suite, and the Office 2007 Beta 2. Anything else can be handled on an as-needed basis, but those apps are critical to what I do.

Rather than hunt for the CD, I decided download the lastest Palm Desktop after I got my wireless working. I had the install CDs handy for the others.

My wireless NIC ran into problems right off the bat. When you choose to install the D-Link drivers from the CD, you also get the configuration utility (whether you want it or not). The configuration utility would not launch properly. I finally just pointed Vista to the appropriate .inf file on the CD and let it install the card drivers on its own. This proved to be a much simpler solution and worked quite well. I know that there was an updated driver for XP on Microsoft Update as early as mid-December of 2005, but there was no sign of it when I ran Update after installing Vista.

With a working internet connection, I downloaded the latest Palm Desktop for my Zire 31. The package installed quite nicely and ran like a charm, but absolutely refused to sync with the Palm device. For some reason it thinks it’s connected via a serial cable to COM1, which is not the case. I do not see any settings that can be changed to get it recognize that it’s connected through a USB port, so the Palm device is just dead weight at this point as far as my laptop is concerned. I’m either going to have to live without it or start synching with my desktop machine. I’ll probably opt for the latter - a fix from Microsoft and Palm do not appear to be in the immediate future and the Vista forums only report the existence of the problem with no solution provided.

Macromedia MX 2004 Suite installed cleanly and runs just as well as it did under XP. I was able to restore my sites from a backup copy on an external drive and it was just a matter of setting up the remote server connection to pick up exactly where I had left off earlier today.

Office 2007 Beta 2 also installed cleanly and ran like a charm. I was unable to locate the converter packs for Office 2003 and earlier, but perhaps this was just because I didn’t have an earlier version installed.

 One issue that cropped up early on was my USB optical mouse. Vista recognized the device and installed a PnP driver with no problem. However the mouse configuration utility that it also installed (ico.exe) immediately pegged the processor to 100% usage and refused to come down. Lowering the process’s priority only served to allow other applications to have first dibs on the processor cycles, but usage remained at 100%. As soon as I killed the process, processor usage dropped to 1% to 2% and I did not find any change in the mouse’s functionality.

I’m still waiting on my own copy of Vista to appear from the good folks at Redmond (it’s only been close to 9 weeks since I ordered it). In the interim, I’m using a friend’s CD (the beta license allows installation on 10 computers, so I’m legal as far as I know) and everything else seems to be working quite well. Since school starts up on Monday, it’s going to get quite a workout over the next few weeks.

This entry was posted on Thursday, 10 August 2006 at 02:37 and is filed under Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.