Old School
07-21-2008, 14:42
For a variety of reasons I don't wish to get into, I purchased a Dell laptop with Vista Home Basic. It was through SP 1 so I thought most of the bugs were resolved. Here's what I learned - sharing for fellow GTers and anyone else who goes down that path.
The biggest adjustment with Vista is setup patience. What we previously learned about internet speed and RAM don't matter. Seriously. Obscene T1, true gigabit performance with 1 TB RAM don't mean jack. It's just going to take time. Don't fight it. If you do anything else before these steps, you will have to restore to your original settings and start over. You can't shortcut the process. If you've done otherwise and had better luck - you're lucky. This is for those who don't want to invite Vista headaches.
Day 1: Turn on your new machine with it wired to the net. That means no wireless during setup. Stay away from anything but the most basic router settings. If you're doing static IPs, etc, I suggest plugging directly into your modem. Answer their questions to set up a password, etc and before you do ANYTHING, let it connect to the Windows Update site. This will take about 1.5 hour. Let the updates install, another 45 minutes. Let the security updates happen and complete scan happen. Go ahead and dedicate an 8 hour day for this setup. Let it cycle through the scheduled auto update process (at 2AM or whenever) before you do anything else.
Day 2 It's safe to open MS Word, etc and 'register' the software. Again, this communicates with MS, so it could take a while. Don't do anything else, letting the scheduled MS update happen again.
Day 3 is when Vista feels that you have correctly prioritized MS software and you are allowed to do everything else. Connecting to wireless, printers, uninstalling unwanted s/w, installing 3 party browsers, firewalls, virus, malware, etc.
I'm through day 7 and things seem to be going well. I wouldn't say that the software has bugs in the traditional sense, but it's far from a clean process. Best to wait as long as you can before moving to Vista.
The biggest adjustment with Vista is setup patience. What we previously learned about internet speed and RAM don't matter. Seriously. Obscene T1, true gigabit performance with 1 TB RAM don't mean jack. It's just going to take time. Don't fight it. If you do anything else before these steps, you will have to restore to your original settings and start over. You can't shortcut the process. If you've done otherwise and had better luck - you're lucky. This is for those who don't want to invite Vista headaches.
Day 1: Turn on your new machine with it wired to the net. That means no wireless during setup. Stay away from anything but the most basic router settings. If you're doing static IPs, etc, I suggest plugging directly into your modem. Answer their questions to set up a password, etc and before you do ANYTHING, let it connect to the Windows Update site. This will take about 1.5 hour. Let the updates install, another 45 minutes. Let the security updates happen and complete scan happen. Go ahead and dedicate an 8 hour day for this setup. Let it cycle through the scheduled auto update process (at 2AM or whenever) before you do anything else.
Day 2 It's safe to open MS Word, etc and 'register' the software. Again, this communicates with MS, so it could take a while. Don't do anything else, letting the scheduled MS update happen again.
Day 3 is when Vista feels that you have correctly prioritized MS software and you are allowed to do everything else. Connecting to wireless, printers, uninstalling unwanted s/w, installing 3 party browsers, firewalls, virus, malware, etc.
I'm through day 7 and things seem to be going well. I wouldn't say that the software has bugs in the traditional sense, but it's far from a clean process. Best to wait as long as you can before moving to Vista.