my vista install experience

I have installed Vista on two different computers with generally good results, except a failed attempt to upgrade from Windows XP Home on one of the PCs. I think that Microsoft has finally created an OS which will considerably change the way you interact with your computer. I’m really excited about the plethora of new and useful features, the new graphical interface and the wonderful addition of parental controls.
The upgrade attempt was done on a Ice-Cube VG61 on which I had previously installed a clean copy of Windows XP Home. All updates from Microsoft were also added and all drivers had been updated with the latest versions for all hardware components. No Spyware, Ad-ware or Viruses were present on the machine prior to the beginning of the upgrade process.
The Specs The PC has an Intel 845 Chipset Motherboard, equipped with a Pentium 4, 2.53Ghz 400MHz FSB, 512MB of DDR333 memory. The graphic card is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and the sound card a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (ouch!). The Hard Disk drive is a 250GB Maxtor, sharing the single IDE port with a DVD reader drive configured as slave. A mix of free and pay-ware software was also installed on the machine, to simulate an average user PC environment (Real Player, QuickTime, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office 2000 Standard, MS Flight Simulator 2004 with 9.1 patch, X-Plane 8.3).
To upgrade… After booting up Windows XP, I inserted the DVD disc with the BETA 2 version of Vista and I was presented with the options to either upgrade or do a clean install. An option to create a different partition for Vista is also available. However I elected not to try it due to bad experiences in the past, users reporting problems in MS Vista forums and the fact that partitions are generally not a good thing from the performance point of view. Usually Operating Systems tend to organize the most frequently accessed files on the outer edge of the Hard Disk, were access times are fastest. When you introduce a partition, the outer edge might not be available to the OS anymore.
The installation process began promptly after selecting the Upgrade option. From this point on, everything slew down to turtle speed. The copying of files from DVD to Hard Disk took approximately one and a half hour, while decompression passed the two hours mark. The all thing took an astonishing time in excess of 4 hours to finish. Something must have interfered. At the end of the upgrade, the only thing I was able to access was Vista in safe mode. The upgrade only caused the PC to try and boot over and over with automatic restart. I was never able to boot to the Desktop unless I used safe mode. A quick look at the MS Vista forum revealed a compatibility issue with the Santa Cruz soundcard drivers. Uninstalling the drivers while in safe mode and physically removing the soundcard solved the problem. However I now was faced with a new one. During the installation process, at the very beginning where Vista wants the registration key, I left the checkmark on where it asks you if you want to automatically activate Vista upon first boot. Bad idea. I’m now finally able to boot the machine but as soon as Vista comes to life, it’s asking for the registration key again. Numerous attempts to enter the key only produced validation errors. I tried to copy and paste the key, typing it manually, with dashes, no dashes etc, to no avail. Hmmm…if this was a production machine I would have been in big trouble now.
…or not to upgrade? DON’T. Especially if you have important data on your PC. The upgrade process is not safe enough in this build of Vista. Of course there might have been something in the configuration of this particular PC that caused the failure. Probably other users had better results. But since I can’t confirm it, I simply advise anybody against an upgrade. On the other end, the clean install performed flawlessly and the installation took approximately an hour, maybe less. I simply booted from DVD and then proceeded to delete and recreate the partition with Vista install interface. I wanted to perform a full format but apparently the user isn’t given a choice. Might have missed something but when I chose to format the Hard Disk, it just went straight for a quick format. This time I unchecked “Automatically activate Vista” when prompted to enter the registration key.
At first reboot, all of the Hardware was properly recognized and installed, even the onboard sound, which I elected to use instead of the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. It is however possible to use this soundcard, as long as you install the latest drivers first (sc_4193.exe) and then have access to a Windows XP partition with an earlier release of the drivers (sc_4161s ) properly installed. See here for more info http://support.turtlebeach.com/site/kb_ftp/585218360.asp . The beta drivers for the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro worked great (downloadable from the manufacturer website). No chipset installation software is needed and DirectX 10 is already included in the install. Vista also provided drivers for peripherals connected at a later time: an HP psc1210 printer, a Creative Webcam PD1120 and an USB mouse. The activation worked perfectly this time around.
The Vista view Vista on this machine performs a little sluggish at startup. After being presented with the desktop, the Hard Disk activity led keeps flashing for another 5 minutes. An additional stick of 512MB memory would make things work better. I have a feeling that Vista with 512MB of memory will perform the same as Windows XP loaded on a machine with 256MB. However, after the initial loading, everything works with an acceptable speed, unless you decide to multitask. I love the elegance of the graphical side of the OS. Looks like Microsoft has finally decided to dedicate the proper development time and money to it. Not only is beautiful, it’s captivating. But this is not the only reason why you would want to upgrade when the time comes. Another very valid reason is the Parental Controls. I can now create users and decide which folders they can have access to, which websites, which programs they can or cannot use, what type of games they can install or play and you can even set a specified amount of time a user can work (or play) at the PC. Additionally you can enable an activity log function, which records everything a specific user does. This is useful for Dads who want to keep track of where their sons/daughters are going or doing on the net, for example. I’m still experimenting with this operating system and I’ll try to make a full report on Vista later on, if needed. In the meantime, I hope that my experience will help anybody who decided to give Vista beta a try. Just keep one thing in mind: DON’T USE A PRODUCTION MACHINE. If you have to, get a different Hard Disk and completely disconnect the one where your Windows XP (or other OS) resides.
Maurizio De Luca

Just for information, I'm running a "normal" contingent of programs here, mail, IE7 (half a dozen tabs) and a program running as a service. As per task manager, Vista is using 1.63GB of the available 2GB installed. And I thought that installing 2GB was way overkill, I just may have to go for the full 4GB :0
Ray

The Vista view Vista on this machine performs a little sluggish at startup. After being presented with the desktop, the Hard Disk activity led keeps flashing for another 5 minutes. An additional stick of 512MB memory would make things work better. I have a feeling that Vista with 512MB of memory will perform the same as Windows XP loaded on a machine with 256MB. However, after the initial loading, everything works with an acceptable speed, unless you decide to multitask.
Maurizio De Luca

Windows is designed to take advantage of as much memory as possible. Going to 4GB is fine and you would see some increase in the amount of memory in use, but be aware that if you only had 1GB Windows would just use the swap file more. It would not make that much difference as to what you can run, only how Windows handles it. Just because Windows is using 1.6GB+ does not mean Windows requires that much memory. It is just glad to have it.
"Ray" wrote in message

Just for information, I'm running a "normal" contingent of programs here, mail, IE7 (half a dozen tabs) and a program running as a service. As per task manager, Vista is using 1.63GB of the available 2GB installed. And I thought that installing 2GB was way overkill, I just may have to go for the full 4GB :0
Ray
The Vista view Vista on this machine performs a little sluggish at startup. After being presented with the desktop, the Hard Disk activity led keeps flashing for another 5 minutes. An additional stick of 512MB memory would make things work better. I have a feeling that Vista with 512MB of memory will perform the same as Windows XP loaded on a machine with 256MB. However, after the initial loading, everything works with an acceptable speed, unless you decide to multitask.
Maurizio De Luca

I've got 1GB RAM... Not sure what a "...'normal contingent of programs'..." is but I've got IE with 6 tabs, Word Beta with the 60MB Vista Product Guide, Excel (no file), Access (no file), Powerpoint (no file) and Visio (no file) open and I've got 275K free physical memory.
"Ray" wrote in message

Just for information, I'm running a "normal" contingent of programs here, mail, IE7 (half a dozen tabs) and a program running as a service. As per task manager, Vista is using 1.63GB of the available 2GB installed. And I thought that installing 2GB was way overkill, I just may have to go for the full 4GB :0
Ray
The Vista view Vista on this machine performs a little sluggish at startup. After being presented with the desktop, the Hard Disk activity led keeps flashing for another 5 minutes. An additional stick of 512MB memory would make things work better. I have a feeling that Vista with 512MB of memory will perform the same as Windows XP loaded on a machine with 256MB. However, after the initial loading, everything works with an acceptable speed, unless you decide to multitask.
Maurizio De Luca

Ypu! I checked the task manager on the second machine I have Vista installed onto. It has 2GB of ram and the page file is 700MB with a peak of 800MB.
"Colin Barnhorst" wrote:

Windows is designed to take advantage of as much memory as possible. Going to 4GB is fine and you would see some increase in the amount of memory in use, but be aware that if you only had 1GB Windows would just use the swap file more. It would not make that much difference as to what you can run, only how Windows handles it. Just because Windows is using 1.6GB+ does not mean Windows requires that much memory. It is just glad to have it.
"Ray" wrote in message Just for information, I'm running a "normal" contingent of programs here, mail, IE7 (half a dozen tabs) and a program running as a service. As per task manager, Vista is using 1.63GB of the available 2GB installed. And I thought that installing 2GB was way overkill, I just may have to go for the full 4GB :0
Ray
The Vista view Vista on this machine performs a little sluggish at startup. After being presented with the desktop, the Hard Disk activity led keeps flashing for another 5 minutes. An additional stick of 512MB memory would make things work better. I have a feeling that Vista with 512MB of memory will perform the same as Windows XP loaded on a machine with 256MB. However, after the initial loading, everything works with an acceptable speed, unless you decide to multitask.
Maurizio De Luca

because he suggests that if you partition a harddisk, the operating system (vista) cannot make use of the faster outer edge of the harddisk. Well. If you have two operating systems, it's logical: only one OS can make use of the c: (the c: is always at the faster outer ring of the HD) But this difference is only marginal. If you have a disk of say 250 GB and c and d are both 10 GB. (so e: = 230GB) than does this tiny little bit make a difference? NO! This would also mean that larger HD's are slower than smaller ones (because there's relatively more data on the inner rings, which are slower). And this aint true either, because the other factors that determine the speed of the HD are much more important!!! And he also forgets that if you only have system files in the os partition, that the fragmentation of the files in that partition will occur much slower. So, in this case it's even faster, and you don't have to defragment as often!! Also, if the partition the OS is on, is very small, you can easily make an image of the entire partition (in my case, after a year of use, the partition of XP is only 4GB (due to XP updates)big. Also the virtual mem is on a dedicated partition, and my documents is on another partition. This means that i can make a backup of only 2GB (because the backup program compresses the image) in 3 minutes, and restore it in 3 minutes!!!!). So if the OS crashes, it's only 3 minutes, and the backup image is restored and it's working again!
"Colin Barnhorst" wrote:

Why did you not install to a separate partition or hard drive as is so strongly by MS and the users here? At 512MB ram you will see poor performance at this stage of the code (lots of debugging code and not yet optimized). I suspect build 5472 would have performed a little better. It has on my test boxes.
"Robert H" <Robert H@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message I have also just performed an upgrade to Vista on my PC, the results are far below what I thought it would be. I am running P4 2.8GHz processor with 60Gb HDD and 512MB Ram, and it still runs slow and sluggish, I also had Office Professional 2000 loaded and guess what nonoe of the programs have loaded correctly after the upgrade. When downloading the Beta test to upgrade to Office 2007, it will not take, it says it has an error. At this stage I am attempting to dump all my files to a back up drive and re install Win XP Pro, so if you are thinking about an upgrade right now ----- DONT!!!!, leave it for a while until the kinks are ironed out, also if you are using an ATI Radeon 9200 card for the driver there is no upgrade for it provided for Vista, another point nobody told me about.
"Silo" wrote:
I have installed Vista on two different computers with generally good results, except a failed attempt to upgrade from Windows XP Home on one of the PCs. I think that Microsoft has finally created an OS which will considerably change the way you interact with your computer. I'm really excited about the plethora of new and useful features, the new graphical interface and the wonderful addition of parental controls.
The upgrade attempt was done on a Ice-Cube VG61 on which I had previously installed a clean copy of Windows XP Home. All updates from Microsoft were also added and all drivers had been updated with the latest versions for all hardware components. No Spyware, Ad-ware or Viruses were present on the machine prior to the beginning of the upgrade process.
The Specs The PC has an Intel 845 Chipset Motherboard, equipped with a Pentium 4, 2.53Ghz 400MHz FSB, 512MB of DDR333 memory. The graphic card is an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and the sound card a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (ouch!). The Hard Disk drive is a 250GB Maxtor, sharing the single IDE port with a DVD reader drive configured as slave. A mix of free and pay-ware software was also installed on the machine, to simulate an average user PC environment (Real Player, QuickTime, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Office 2000 Standard, MS Flight Simulator 2004 with 9.1 patch, X-Plane 8.3).
To upgrade. After booting up Windows XP, I inserted the DVD disc with the BETA 2 version of Vista and I was presented with the options to either upgrade or do a clean install. An option to create a different partition for Vista is also available. However I elected not to try it due to bad experiences in the past, users reporting problems in MS Vista forums and the fact that partitions are generally not a good thing from the performance point of view. Usually Operating Systems tend to organize the most frequently accessed files on the outer edge of the Hard Disk, were access times are fastest. When you introduce a partition, the outer edge might not be available to the OS anymore.
The installation process began promptly after selecting the Upgrade option. From this point on, everything slew down to turtle speed. The copying of files from DVD to Hard Disk took approximately one and a half hour, while decompression passed the two hours mark. The all thing took an astonishing time in excess of 4 hours to finish. Something must have interfered. At the end of the upgrade, the only thing I was able to access was Vista in safe mode. The upgrade only caused the PC to try and boot over and over with automatic restart. I was never able to boot to the Desktop unless I used safe mode. A quick look at the MS Vista forum revealed a compatibility issue with the Santa Cruz soundcard drivers. Uninstalling the drivers while in safe mode and physically removing the soundcard solved the problem. However I now was faced with a new one. During the installation process, at the very beginning where Vista wants the registration key, I left the checkmark on where it asks you if you want to automatically activate Vista upon first boot. Bad idea. I'm now finally able to boot the machine but as soon as Vista comes to life, it's asking for the registration key again. Numerous attempts to enter the key only produced validation errors. I tried to copy and paste the key, typing it manually, with dashes, no dashes etc, to no avail. Hmmm.if this was a production machine I would have been in big trouble now.
.or not to upgrade? DON'T. Especially if you have important data on your PC. The upgrade process is not safe enough in this build of Vista. Of course there might have been something in the configuration of this particular PC that caused the failure. Probably other users had better results. But since I can't confirm it, I simply advise anybody against an upgrade. On the other end, the clean install performed flawlessly and the installation took approximately an hour, maybe less. I simply booted from DVD and then proceeded to delete and recreate the partition with Vista install interface. I wanted to perform a full format but apparently the user isn't given a choice. Might have missed something but when I chose to format the Hard Disk, it just went straight for a quick format. This time I unchecked "Automatically activate Vista" when prompted to enter the registration key.
At first reboot, all of the Hardware was properly recognized and installed, even the onboard sound, which I elected to use instead of the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. It is however possible to use this soundcard, as long as you install the latest drivers first (sc_4193.exe) and then have access to a Windows XP partition with an earlier release of the drivers (sc_4161s ) properly installed. See here for more info http://support.turtlebeach.com/site/kb_ftp/585218360.asp . The beta drivers for the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro worked great (downloadable from the manufacturer website). No chipset installation software is needed and DirectX 10 is already included in the install. Vista also provided drivers for peripherals connected at a later time: an HP psc1210 printer, a Creative Webcam PD1120 and an USB mouse. The activation worked perfectly this time around.
The Vista view Vista on this machine performs a little sluggish at startup. After being presented with the desktop, the Hard Disk activity led keeps flashing for another 5 minutes. An additional stick of 512MB memory would make things work better. I have a feeling that Vista with 512MB of memory will perform the same as Windows XP loaded on a machine with 256MB. However, after the initial loading, everything works with an acceptable speed, unless you decide to multitask. I love the elegance of the graphical side of the OS. Looks like Microsoft has finally decided to dedicate the proper development time and money to it. Not only is beautiful, it's captivating. But this is not the only reason why you would want to upgrade when the time comes. Another very valid reason is the Parental Controls. I can now create users and decide which folders they can have access to, which websites, which programs they can or cannot use, what type of games they can install or play and you can even set a specified amount of time a user can work (or play) at the PC. Additionally you can enable an activity log function, which records everything a specific user does. This is useful for Dads who want to keep track of where their sons/daughters are going or doing on the net, for example. I'm still experimenting with this operating system and I'll try to make a full report on Vista later on, if needed. In the meantime, I hope that my experience will help anybody who decided to give Vista beta a try. Just keep one thing in mind: DON'T USE A PRODUCTION MACHINE. If you have to, get a different Hard Disk and completely disconnect the one where your Windows XP (or other OS) resides.
Maurizio De Luca