Monday, June 4, 2007 - Mon, 4 Jun 2007

It took almost all day to get most of everything working on Vista.

After the device drivers were installed (I had to do it again in the morning because it stopped when there was one it couldn’t install), then it was up to trying things out and seeing what didn’t work.

1. It wouldn’t install the touchpad driver, but the touchpad works OK, so I’ll leave that alone.
2. My Antivirus AVG free wouldn’t work. It needed to be reinstalled.
3. It took several attempts to install the Video driver. It seemed to stall partway through.
4. Once installed it I did not have the slick Aero interface. I found I had update the Windows Experience Index (what a name!) and that raised my computer’s “experience” from 1 to 3 after the video driver was installed, allowing the Aero interface.
5. It wouldn’t connect to my Wireless Network on reboot. I had to check the option to connect even if the network is not broadcasting. I leave broadcasting off for better security.
6. No sound!!!! This one took a few hours to solve. Apparently the Conexant High Def Audio driver has some bugs with HP laptops. The solution ending up being to uninstall the device driver and let Windows find and install a new driver for the sound.
7. Had to reinstall the printer driver to my HP networked printer.
8. First time I run Microsoft Mail, it loads in the messages from Outlook Express … very slowly … two a second … 2500 messages later … it’s loaded.
9. The direct import of the Address book into the Contact list didn’t seem to work. So I used a comma separated export file from the Address book, and that worked.

My recommendation: Unless you have the confidence (and patience) to do it, don’t upgrade your machine to Vista. A clean Vista install is most likely easier. Better yet, wait until you buy a new computer with Vista on it.

And Behold seems to look and run fine on Vista. It takes about the same amount of time, and maybe 5% less memory.