My Free copy of Vista has arrived
Back in November I spent a little time watching videos to get a free copy of Windows Vista. (Thanks to Things That Make you Go Hmm! ) I did watch all the required video, but maybe MS is only giving out one or the other? I’m sure there were limited copies.
I had since forgot I did so. Last Thursday when I arrived home from work a discreet brown envelope arrived from Microsoft with my name on it! Heres the goods!
I’m always leary of upgrading anything, especially an OS. I hardly have enough time to upgrade, let alone troubleshoot or “un-upgrade”. But I was curious and also a bit excited. So, I decided to upgrade my laptop. Shortly after throwing in the disk I was presented with the agreement screen, along with the new looking backdrop.
Next I was presented with an option to use the upgrade advisor (optional) to see if my system had what it took. Of course it required the .NET framework to be installed in order to use it. This I really disliked. It forced me to the web to install it. This makes me wonder if I wasn’t yet connected, if it would offer to install it from the disk? After some blinking and flashing the advisor gave me the go-ahead.
Shortly after accepting this and proceeding with the upgrade Vista ran a compatability check on my hardware to see if there would be any confilcts. Most of my hardware seemed to check out. The items that didn’t were dell specific. At this point I wondered if Dell is aware of this. I also wondered “Why isnt the OS just backward compatable?”. 
I had a loading screen for about an hour and a half with a note on the bottom stating “It can take a few hours to upgrade your computer”. Good thing I had other things to do!
If finally loaded. I knew right off the bat my Dell programs weren’t working right because the volume keys worked, but the visual display of it on my screen did not. It was getting late and didn’t have too much time to look it over really. I looked quickly at the nifty 3D screen chooser, and the new look of the explorer. It also came with a few gadgets running by default. It seemed to have more of a Mac look and feel. Especially explorer. It also seemed to have a larger memory footprint.
I did have a moment while trying out an MMORPG where the system suddenly shut off. When I turned it back on, there was some text on the screen complaining of temperatures, and something possibly blocking the fan. Never have seen this before. I’m guessing it has a lot to do with the dell BIOS, or software talking with Vista properly…
What version are (or were) they giving away? They have so many Vista versions that I can’t keep track. I’m planning to upgrade soon. How do you like it so far?
It’s the business version. I didn’t check to see what release number it was. I’ve since UNinstalled it, reformatted, and went back to XP Pro.
My laptop only has 1GB of RAM. The interface in general seemed more Mac like. There were some widgets as well.
I took it to my wifes work (she needed a fatter machine to work on temporarily). It took me about 10 minutes to join the thing to the network with a standard dynamic IP addressing scheme. I couldn’t find my way around that thing to manually configure the NIC to save my life. I don’t mind learning curves, but it seems that Vista is full of wizards and such to make it more dummy proof. So much so that it was hard to find the manual config areas.
It seemed to be a heavy footprint on my system. Almost like one needs to have a duocore system to run this well.
I’ll wait until I get a duocore machine before I move to Vista. I don’t need bells and whistles. Just want it to work, fast, and simple.
I’m hearing basically the same for other people that have tried it. I just go the Business version and not sure if I even want to try. I got XP all setup the way I like it. Haven’t found a compelling reason to move just yet. Thanks for the info.
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