Taking the plunge

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I did it yesterday!  I took the plunge and installed Vista + Office 2007 on my main work machine which is a Toshiba M4 laptop.  That's right...  barring any major show stoppers I encounter in the next couple of days, I'll be looking at XP through my rearview mirror (and on my secondary back up machine!)

So how's it been so far?  Not bad!  The installation experience was very smooth.  I liked how it presented me with a nice GUI throughout the entire process, not the blue & white screens from previous versions that were reminiscent of the blue screen of death!  Just a few questions at the beginning and the setup went on with almost no input from me.  I timed it, and from when I put in the installation DVD until I was able to type my first e-mail in Outlook was about 45 minutes!  I don't recall ever installing XP that fast. 

Now I did experience one major hiccup so far which I must apologize for.  Last night I was scheduled to speak at the NY Enterprise Windows user group about all of the great new security features in Vista, IIS, and IE7.  Before I paved the machine over with Vista, I forgot to update my BIOS to the latest version.  That resulted in the external display adapter not functioning correctly, rendering the machine useless for doing a presentation.  This was a known issue with the M4 that I sorta knew about, but forgot.

Note:  The presentation did go forward after I switched to my XP back up machine.

This morning, I created a bootable BIOS CD from Toshiba's website and upgraded the BIOS.  I hooked in an external monitor today and all seems well!  I installed a few more applications today with no glitches:

  • Office Communicator
  • Windows Live Messenger
  • Windows Live Writer (so I can write this post)
  • Etrust Anti-Virus
  • The internal Microsoft VPN client

On Monday, I'll be installing the big kahuna: Visual Studio 2005 and making sure I can get my developer environment all set up again. 

As I start using Vista for everyday usage, one thing I'll be trying to pay attention to is user experience issues.  At the Bar Camp in NYC over the weekend, I got a lot of feedback from Mac users who were passionate about these types of things.  I'm going watch out for how Vista handles some of the scenarios folks were critical of in previous versions of Windows.  Hopefully, I'll have some good results to post about in the future!