Attended the Windows Vista Install Fair
What’s an “Install Fair” you ask? Well apparently Microsoft is more serious than ever about making sure users upgrading their Windows install to the new version, in this case that version is the soon to be released Vista, have a smooth and successful experience. Microsoft invited volunteers to come to their Silicon Valley campus and install the latest build of Vista (RC2) and report on their experience during and after the Vista upgrade. Several Microsoft engineers were on hand to assist and observe.
How was my experience? Well, not so great. I arrived a little late and combined with the fact that the Vista Upgrade process took FOREVER, my laptop was still grinding through the upgrade even as the event wound down. At one of the points when the setup process required a reboot, I shut the laptop with the intention of continuing it back at home. However, after talking with some MS folks about application compatibility with apps like Apache and MySQL, I realized that I was better off first dual-booting Vista on a separate partition and check for compatibility before I make the leap with my primary environment.
Luckily, Vista has an awesome setup rollback feature. At any point of the upgrade, you can quit the upgrade process and rollback to your prior XP installation. Since I was about 90% done with the upgrade process, I was really wary about trying the rollback. I had a bad feeling that I might end up with no Vista and a defunct XP install. I did some quick searching on the Web and found that many people were reporting that the rollback functioned flawlessly. So I crossed my fingers and went for it. Maybe 5 minutes later, I was back in XP like nothing ever happened. I was blown away.
When I get some time in the coming week, I’ll dual-boot Vista and check it out. I must say the new Aero UI in Vista is slick as hell. Unfortunately, you need 128MB of dedicated graphics memory to run Aero at resolution of 1280×1024 and above. My laptop only has 64MB. I’m definitely going to look into whether an upgrade is possible…
