Hello from Vistaland

January 29th, 2007

Windows Vista officially goes on sale tomorrow, Tuesday, 30 January 2007–but thanks to the awesomeness of Newegg.com, I had an OEM Copy of Windows Vista Home Premium last Thursday. I’ll admit: I’m an unrepentant early-adopter. Naturally, that’s gotten me into some annoying fixes in the past…and it’s done so again. Yet, amazingly enough, I ran into far fewer problems installing Windows Vista than I’ve ever had with previous versions of Windows, including Windows XP. So here, for your delectation and possible edification, is Uncle Pegritz’s Adventures with Windows Vista!

The purpose of this article is simple: to give readers an overview of what upgrading to Windows Vista is like from a Not-Quite-Average Joe’s perspective. The ‘Net is literally inundated in Vistababble these days–a quick Google search of the terms “Windows Vista” kicks up around 240 million hits–and amid that much hubbub it’s difficult to separate the signal from the noise. Everywhere you look, Microsoft is waving its Aero-glassed wienie around, proclaiming that Vista will revolutionize everything from searching your hidden pr0n collection to making coffee. E-pundits are spitting out list after list after list of reasons (not) to upgrade to Vista. Macheads are smirking behind their overgrown bangs and whining about the innate superiority of OS X. Linux/Open-Source zealots are squealing about proprietary code, entrenched DRM, and the innate superiority of *Nix varieties. And, somewhere, John Dvorak is probably prying a ludicrous statement like “Windows Vista Ultimate is going to sell precisely 3 copies in the continental US” out of the desiccated crannies of his ass.

Well, just as I promised you no hype and no bullshit from my previous article concerning what you need to know before even considering to upgrade to Vista, once again I promise you nothing but The Facts when it comes to actually installing the damn thing. But first, a few things you need to know:

My computer is no more than six months old. I bought it back in August of 2006, and it’s a pretty current machine: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor 4600+ running at 2.40 gHz, with 2 gigs of RAM, a 300gb hard-drive, and an aftermarket GeForce 7300 videocard. Not bleeding-edge, not even top-o’-the-line, but certainly a pretty beefy machine whose specs are well within those MS advises for the best Vista experience. Nonetheless, chances are good that if you have a similarly-equipped machine, your experience will be pretty close to mine. If you have an older machine…well, things will still probably work out the same–hopefully–but they’ll definitely happen slower. Windows Vista itself is surprisingly resource-friendly (very little different than WinXP), but the installation itself is a beast. Not in the difficulty sense…just the time involved, as you’ll see.

Also, keep in mind that I’m definitely not a hardcore übergeek. I can’t code a lick (hell, CSS styling code is sometimes beyond my capabilities), I’m sure as hell not 1337, and I’m certainly not an MSCE. But neither am I am clueless butt-end-user who can’t figure out what the “Esc” key is for let alone boot a Windows install into Safe Mode. The article you’re about to read is aimed at reasonably-intelligent, reasonably-experienced folks who just want to know what kind of issues they might face if they run out to the Best Buy and snag a copy of Windows Vista for their Compy386. Got it?

OK, then. Let’s see about this thang.

First things first. If you don’t want to spend the time reading the rest of this article, just grok the following conveniently-bulleted list of Important Points that will break it down for you in an oldskool fashion:

Back up all of your documents, pictures, pr0n, etc. before you even think about upgrading to Vista. (Well, duh.)
Run Windows Upgrade Advisor to: A) determine whether your computer can handle Vista, if you’re not sure already; and B) most importantly, discover if any of your hardware devices require drivers that will need updating to work with Vista. The Vista installation will take care of a lot of these driver issues, as you’ll see, but it’s always best to go to your device manufacturer’s website and download any Vista-compatible drivers you can find just in case.
Don’t bother with Windows Vista Ultimate unless–seriously–you really need to encrypt your hard-drive so the Russians won’t steal your Momma’s Polonium-Filled Coconut Cookies recipe. Windows Vista Home Premium is more than secure enough by default, and it offers all of the applications and features that make Windows Vista interesting and none of the superfluous “extras” that you’ll probably never use. Also, don’t waste your money on an overpriced Upgrade version or–dear gods–on a monstrously overpriced Full version. Get an OEM version from Newegg.com. If you don’t know what an OEM edition is, read this.
DO NOT upgrade an already-existing WindowsXP (or, gods forbid, <XP version of Windows) installation. It will only lead to tears and/or dirty, dirty swear-words.
DO perform a clean install by booting from the colorful-swirly-holographicky installation DVD, reformatting your C: drive (or the bootable partition thereof). Seriously. Yeah, you’ll have to reinstall all of your software, and that will bring with it issues of its own, but all in all it’s a much better experience. No cussin’ or summoning of Great Old Ones necessary.
DO NOT, for ANY reason, install any antivirus program other than the latest version of AVG Free or Microsoft’s own OneCare. Any other AV package could very well destroy your entire system and make the world end. I know this from first-hand experience.

So that’s the short version. Now here’s the long one.

On Thursday, when I received my Vista DeeVamaDee in the mail, the first thing I did was back up all of my data. I’ve read quite a few accounts of people performing clean, fresh installs of Windows Vista and either A) having no problems at all or B) having nothing but problems…yet I haven’t read that much about folks upgrading existing installations of, say, Windows XP to Vista. I decided to do that for two reasons:

I really didn’t want to spend the time and hassle reinstalling all of my software and my ten-friggin’-thousand VST plugins onto a clean install; and
I wanted to see how well the upgrade process would work so I could report on it for some friends who’d asked me about it.

Well, friends–and Faithful Readers Who Don’t Actually Know Me–don’t bother upgrading a previous Windows installation. It is a Major Pain in the Ass.

I initiated the upgrade process from within WindowsXP and was immediately treated with a warning that “the upgrade process may take a few hours. Please be patient.” What the F? A few hours. I remember when I upgraded to WinXP from Win98: the install warned me that the upgrade process would take about 45 minutes to 1 hour depending on the speed of my machine, but the process only took about half an hour. Perhaps this warning was merely an “average” estimate much like that. My computer is a pretty hefty beast, though, so I didn’t actually expect the upgrade process to take more than…oh, about an hour.

Wrong. Try three and a half hours.

After the first hour, I got to wondering if something was wrong…yet the little percentage ticker kept counting up another digit every five or ten minutes and I hadn’t been alerted of any errors. After the second hour, I began to ponder what the hell was going on in my computer. The hard-drive light was running incessantly, as was the DVD-drive activity light. Was the Vista DeeVamaDee restructuring spacetime within my computer’s case? Was the new Vista DRM underpinnings based on some kind of nanowiring schema that was currently being generated by assemblers grown from the surface of the disk itself? Damned if I knew! By the third hour, I was in the kitchen grubbin’ on some popcorn and reading the latest issue of Computer Music–when, suddenly, I heard a DING! that sounded rather officious and came back into the Lab to discover the upgrade was done and my computer had booted into Windows Vista successfully.

The first thing I noticed was that Windows Defender, Vista’s little built-in antispyware service, had blocked all of my startup programs–effectively rendering my scanner and printer and a bunch of other devices useless. That was easy enough to fix (I just opened the list of blocked programs and checked off their boxes to permit them to run, then rebooted)…but then I discovered that two of my external hard-drives weren’t functioning. They were both connected via FireWire cables to the FireWire port on my SoundBlaster X-Fi Platinum soundcard. So that made sense: I just needed to install the new (beta, but still functional) Vista-compatible X-FI drivers that I got from Creative’s website and the FireWire port would be good to go again. Nope. I installed the driver and once again had sound…but the FireWire port would not work. Windows Vista kept giving me a “found new hardware” dialogue begging for a driver for a completely “unknown device”, which I assumed to be the FireWire port–although I never managed to actually figure out what it was, since even the Device Manager only described it as “Unknown Device”. OY!

Well, I supposed I’d get that figured out eventually. In the meantime, everything was running as it was before…oh, except for the printer, whose driver’s Vista had apparently forgotten to load or update. I reinstalled the printer drivers easily enough, but Vista still kept giving me an error message that it couldn’t load printer drivers at startup…even though the printer showed up right there in the Printers Control Panel and spat out every test document I sent to it from Word 2007. Huh. Weird.

Everything so far was…kind of unusual, yes, but neither particularly frustrating or unexpected–I’d run into issues just like this when I upgraded to XP from 98, so I knew something of the sort would be likely to happen this time around as well. All of my software seemed to work just fine, so I wasn’t about to fret it. I left the OS to sit overnight and observe just how it would behave after a few hours of steady uptime and went to bed.

The next morning, I came blear-eyed down to the Lab to find the power light on my computer glowing a sullen and–dare I say it?–almost infernal orange rather than its customary chilly robotic blue. Damn it, I thought: Power must’ve gone off overnight. But…wait. The computer’s fan was whirring faintly and the orange light was pulsing. What the….Then it hit me. Sleep mode. My computer had simply gone to sleep.

Now, this was a bit surprising, because I never let my computer go into sleep mode. I have never, ever had a computer that could reliably go to sleep and wake back up again. That particular power-saving technology has been around how long and it still doesn’t work for crap? That’s a whole ‘nother issue, though. Suffice to say, when I bought my computer back in August of 2006, one of the first things I did was disable any and all possibilities of it going to sleep.

But, apparently, sometime in the three-point-five hours Windows Vista had needed to install itself, it had forgotten my power-management settings. Ach, du. Perhaps it would wake up alright, though. I hit the spacebar…the keyboard it up…the Eye of Sauron turned to its customary Colgate Fresh Gel blue…and then–

Blackness.

And the return of my BIOS screen.

I really didn’t know what happened–had the computer actually been asleep, or somehow half-shut-down due to a power failure?–until Vista booted up and handed me a warning that it had recovered from a serious error (defined, simply, as “BlueScreen”). BSoDed! My Windows Vista installation wasn’t even 12 hours old and it had already coughed up its first BSoD. No reason to get excited, though: Windows XP used to freak and mook out BSoDs anytime it went into sleep mode, as well. I looked at Vista’s “Event Viewer” to check if, indeed, the BSoD had originated in a fit of computerized sleep apnea, and yep–there is was: confirmation that the computer had choked trying to wake up. No problemo. I simply loaded up Power Settings and disabled sleep mode again. The end.

Despite the occasional kinks and weirdness, everything was running quite smoothly. In fact, Windows Vista seemed to be running a little bit better on my computer than XP had….And then I did something stupid: I attempted to install Kaspersky Lab’s latest Internet Security 6 beta, which was supposedly Vista-ready.

I had uninstalled Kaspersky Internet Security before upgrading to Vista to avoid any possible conflicts, but I didn’t feel right leaving a Windows installation of any kind sitting without any kind of AV protection–so I’d downloaded the certified Vista-capable beta of KIS, which Kaspersky noted was certainly stable enough for general usage, though it no doubt still contained some bugs here and there. Fine by me. If it worked most of the time, that was good enough for me, as I really liked running KIS under WinXP and wanted to continue to experience under Vista. Hell, I was even prepared to give them money to buy the full versions of their stuff.

All went well until KIS installed a driver of some sort into Windows’ system directly. And then–

BSoDed! AGAIN. But this was an actual Blue Screen o’ Death–a full-fledged Stop Error of the most heinous, systemkilling kind. Normally, whenever BSoDs come up, the system dumps files in memory to the hard-drive so that they can be analyzed upon reboot and a solution offered. Not this time, though….The BSoD was frozen as solid as a blue sheet of pack-ice. Well….Whatever. Reboot, see if things worked, and–if not–uninstall Kaspersky and look for something different.

When the Windows desktop rebooted, everything was proceeding fine and–

BSoD!

You guessed it: same error as before. I immediately knew that the goddamned Kaspersky Killer Driver had rendered my Windows Vista installation completely unstable. The only way to remove it would be to, probably, boot into Safe Mode and try to run the uninstaller from there. So that’s what I did: I booted into Safe Mode and attempted to uninstall the offending software package.

But…oh, what’s this? “Windows Uninstaller will not run in Safe Mode.” That was the first error I got when I tried to uninstall the damned program via the Programs Control Panel. When I tried to run the Uninstall command in the program’s Start Menu folder, I was told that “Uninstall can only work with a previously installed product.” At this point, I became irate and just clicked RESTART, thinking my logical next step would be to try a step-by-step confirmation boot to, perhaps, identify and isolate the Killer Driver.

But my computer wouldn’t reboot. As soon as the BIOS screen cleared, three dreaded words appeared in icy grey DOS-text at the top of the screen:

MISSING OPERATING SYSTEM.

Jesus wept….What now? At this point, I’m going to cut a long story short and merely note that somehow, either by booting into Safe Mode, or because of the Killer Driver, the boot table of my C: drive had gotten erased or damaged or something. I simply could not boot into Windows. So I slapped my Knoppix DVD in to attempt to access the C: drive and see what the fuck had gone wrong. But Knoppix couldn’t even mount the drive. Oh, it could mount allllllllllllll the other ones…but C: was as good as dead.

My last resort was to try to boot from the Windows Vista DVD…which I did successfully. When the boot screen came up, I spotted a small link to restoration and diagnostic tools in the lower left corner. Clicking that brought me to an extremely useful collection of utilities designed to help repair damaged Windows installations. The item most relative to me proclaimed the ability to fix problems that are keeping Windows from starting. So I clicked that…and it found no errors to repair.

Yet, when I rebooted anyway…LO! Windows restarted. It even made it to the point where the desktop came up. I immediately tried to uninstall the goddamned Killer Driver and guess what?

What’s blue, screen-sized, and indicative of massive system hemorrhaging?

At this point…I gave up. I’m leaving out a LOT of details above, but take it from me: the whole process of trying to exorcist the Killer Driver from my little silicone Reagan’s bits and bytes took nearly three hours and involved plenty of horrific blasphemy (on my part), pea-soup-spewing, and the deaths of not one but two Catholic priests who came by to assist in the exorcism. After the ambulance took the bodies away and the police took my statement…I decided the only thing to do was to treat my computer like a prize-winning horse who’d broken all four of its legs.

Want to know what happened next? This part’s actually happy and fun! The Rebirth of Vista.

Reinstalling Windows Vista–that is, performing a completely clean install by formatting my C: drive and installing Vista Home Premium 100% free and unfettered by any leftover XP weirdness–took less than an hour (25 minutes to be exact), and was easily the least eventful OS install I’ve ever done. Quite simply, it went swimmingly.

To start with, the install was ten times faster than the upgrade: Vista just reformatted the hard-drive (thereby fixing its mysterious Missing Operating Systemness), plopped its files on there, and configured itself with no fuss, no muss, and–amazingly enough–no driver problems.

One of the reasons that I wanted to try the upgrade method first was simply that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to track down all of the necessary drivers for the hardware in my machine if I had to go the clean-install route. When I bought the machine (it’s an HP Pavilion, by the way), I knew it was full of fairly generic, common parts…yet, nonetheless, finding the proper drivers for devices whose manufacturers you can’t even begin to identify isn’t an easy proposition. I went to the HP drivers page for my computer’s specific model, but there were only a few drivers there for things such as the modem (I didn’t even know there was one in this machine), the onboard RealTek sound system, and so forth. Nothing that looked helpful to me.

I was worried that when I did the clean install I would discover a lot of hardware that Vista just did not have drivers to support–a repeat of the “Unidentified Device” situation earlier, only worse. But Windows Vista comes with an impressively diverse catalogue of drivers by default, and can hop online and search MS’s collection of drivers for anything even more esoteric. I was pleasantly surprised–and I do mean surprised–to find that Windows Vista managed to find drivers to support all of the hardware in my computer except for my soundcard…though, oddly enough, it did manage to find drivers for the FireWire ports on my soundcard. All I needed to do was install those soundcard drivers and it was on.

In the days since performing my clean install of Windows Vista, my computer has actually run better than ever before. There are a number of reasons for this:

ANY clean OS install runs better than an older install that has aggregated all manner of crud in its cracks.
I haven’t installed much software on it. I’ve taken this opportunity to streamline my software needs to just the programs that I regularly use, and to keep the number of fonts on my machine drastically reduced (from nearly 1000 fonts to just under 300).
Windows Vista actually seems to handle memory allocation and resource management a tiny bit better than XP.

I’ve been quite impressed with Windows Vista’s performance so far. Many of the new applications that ship natively with Vista Home Premium, such as the new Windows Photo Gallery, Calendar, and Windows Mail (ok, it’s just Outlook Express Version 2, but still), are really handy, lightweight, and helpful. The new version of Media Center completely effin’ rocks, and even Windows Media Player 11–which was okay on XP, but a serious resource hog–is extremely useful and efficient on Vista (though I’ll never abandon J. River Media Center 12 for it).

Most of all, though, I adore Vista’s new pervasive search capabilities and the new navigational structure for Explorer windows. I’ll go into the usefulness of this functionality in greater detail in a future article. Suffice to say, it has become indispensable in only a few days’ working with Vista.

It has most definitely not all been smooth sailing, however. Audio applications–the core of my computer usage–do not play well with Vista yet. Renoise works perfectly, but Sony Acid 6.0 is so buggy and full of weird, unexpected behaviors under Vista that it’s virtually unusable. VST plugins install just fine, and work flawlessly in Renoise…though none of them show up in Acid 6.0 or Adobe Audition 2.0 (which struggles so badly to run in Vista that it’s almost pathetic to witness). Though this is seriously biting into my production capabilities for now, I’m not worried, as none of these issues are incredibly complex and insurmountable. Worry not: there’ll be 100% Vista-compatible versions of Audition (now called Soundbooth, I think), Acid 6.0, SoundForge, and so forth hitting the market soon enough. These compatibility issues are only slightly relevant for now, as all of the apps I use are under active development.

Still, the sooner the better….

However, I have not run into any other major installation difficulties at all. Like I said, this has been the easiest new-OS-installation I’ve ever gone through…which, despite Microsoft’s constant blather about how much of Vista has been completely recoded, is not that alarming. After all, Vista is not a revolutionary change such as the jump from Win 3.1/DOS to Win95, or even Win98/ME to XP.

So there you have it. Pegritz’s experience installing and running Windows Vista. The main lesson here is simple: don’t upgrade from WinXP to Vista. Grab an OEM edition of Vista Home Premium and do a clean install. Your computer will thank you for it. At least now I know why I haven’t read that many articles online about upgrading an XP installation….I must’ve been one of the few people stupid enough to do it!

But from the ashes of my frustration, awesomeness has arisen! I’m really digging Vista so far–particularly all its luscious futuristic eyecandy. But beneath all the glitz and the hype, Microsoft has created a solid product here, one that actually does make computerized life easier. Did I shout “WOWWA-WOOWA!” when it first booted up and the Aero interface slapped me in the face like a big ol’ Polish sausage made of crystal? No. It did let out a few, “Oh, that’s cool”s and a couple “Neato-skeeto”s, though. And chances are, you will, too.

So whenever you get around to taking the plunge and Vistafying your computer, you’ll most likely have a pretty easy time of it if you go with the clean install. And you’ll like what you see when it’s up and running.

And that’s it. Commander Pegritz of the U.S.S.A. Pegritz(.com)! signing off while grooving to I Am Kloot.