Vista

I took the plunge on Friday evening. I pulled out my active hard drive, and installed my backup drive, and installed Vista Ultimate on my Dell Inspiron 9400.

My take: It is great. I like the changes - and I like Office 2007. There are some caveats and hurdles to discuss - but overall, on a powerful enough machine, I like it. I really like the "Aero" interface. Though I feel it steals its look from Mac OS X, that is OK with me. I like Mac OS X better than XP anyway.

Number one pain: UAC. The UAC supposedly prevents malicious software from doing damage by ensuring all the users activity is done under a more security restrictive environment. Though this is good, trying to do any software installation and configuring your system is a dreadful pain. Luckily, you can disable this feature from the User Accounts control panel.

So, thus far I have installed:

• The core of our company's software installed and running (Not ECommerce, yet)
• Office 2007
• SQL Server 2005 Dev edition with SP 2 and Reporting Services. This required Visual Studio 2005 SP 1. Also to get RS to install you need a complete install of IIS 7.0 - select all options, not just the defaults, or it thinks IIS isn't installed
• Visual FoxPro 8 development environment. Though Microsoft says they will only support VFP 9, VFP 8 seems fine. I have successfully compiled and run a VFP DLL.
  
• FireFox 2
• GAIM 2.06 beta.
  

Burning DVDs is slow, slow, slow! - It took over an hour for 3.4 gb! I'm looking for a replacement engine for that. I have played video and music with Media Player 11 (installed the K-Lite Codec Pack to get XVid)

I have a few more things to get working - like a full install of Dev Studio 2005, and either VMWare or Virtual PC - but so far so good. We'll see how this week goes ...