They sure were successful in annoying users.
Talk about being annoyed. Check out my experience installing Windows Vista Home Basic.
My Vista weekend!
I installed Windows Vista Home (upgrade) on one of my spare computers with a Mach Speed MSM939 Mother Board and a 250 Gb hard drive and 256Mb ram just to see if it could be done and what kind of trouble it would be. Well, I finally got it going, but it wasn’t easy.
I first had trouble opening the Windows Vista box. It said to pull on the red tab. My room was a little dark and I didn’t see the info on lifting the plastic tape off the edge. Well, with the aid of a screwdriver for a pry-bar, I opened the damn plastic case and parts fell all over the room. I was able to paste together the Key Code sticker to read the Key Code.
It didn’t start off well for sure. I extracted the DVD from the mess and also found the skimpy manual with quick start platitudes. Practically no useable info.
Well, I had the hard drive on the sacrifice computer partitioned with a 40 Gb C: drive and partitions D:, E:, F:, and G:. I thought that I could boot from the Vista DVD and install it and install it on the C: drive. I wanted a clean install. So I formatted the C: drive to remove the Windows XP Pro operating system on it and proceeded to do the install.
The Vista DVD booted up fine and I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW
A screen came up and said that I had to have at least 512Mb ram. Turned off the computer and installed another DDR 256Mb of ram.
Booted up again with the Vista DVD. It now couldn’t see the hard drive. I booted with Windows 98 and used Norton’s GDISK to see the hard drive. It was gone. I had to turn off the computer completely. Power off for about 5 minutes. Booted again with Windows 98 and now I could see the hard drive with GDISK. All of the partitions were gone. So I did a WipeDisk from GDISK. I was then able to create a 40 Gb Primary partition and format it in Fat32.
Booted from the Vista DVD and again I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW – again!
The new screen said that I could only install Vista Home from within Windows.
OK. Back to the Ghost restore and I restored a Windows XP Pro operating system on the C: drive.
Inserted the Vista DVD and again I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW – again!
Another new screen said that I could only install Vista Home from within Windows XP Home and I needed Windows Vista Ultimate or something like that. I wasn’t seeing to clearly at the new screen.
OK. I installed Windows XP Home on the C: drive which took about an hour. Of course I got all the prompts to Authenticate it but I ignored them. Now I have Windows XP Home running and I think I am home free. No.
Inserted the Vista DVD and again I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW – again!
The new screen said that I could only install Vista Home with a partition that was formatted with NTFS. I am thinking that maybe they could have told me all of these restriction in the first place.
I reformatted the C: drive and again installed Windows XP Home but this time I opted to convert the C: drive to the NTFS format.
I booted up Windows XP Home and started the install from there:
Inserted the Vista DVD and again I typed in the
Key Code: XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-PQWKW – again!
It let me do a “Clean” install without any of the programs running on Windows XP Home. Finally I get the install to take. I now practically know the Key Code by heart.
This took 2 days. That was my weakend. Not weekend. Monday I wanted to try a connect to the Internet from my wireless system. I have the Airlink USB wireless adapter and installed the software from the CD that came with it. It looked OK, but it didn’t work. I finally went on the Internet with a GOOD computer and downloaded the Vista drivers for the USB adapter. Somewhere in here a screen came up and said the driver wouldn’t work until Service Pack 1 was installed. I already had SP1 and yes, it did take more than an hour to install and it did restart the computer numerous time. At least I got a successful installation of SP1.
Now the Airlink USB wireless adapter was installed and working. I got on the internet and was able to view my web page. There was quite a bit of activity on the flashing lights on the wireless adapter. Heaven only knows what kind of info was being transmitted to Microsoft while that was going on.
All this time there was an error message that there was “no sound device installed”. The sound hardware is on the motherboard so I thought I would install the motherboard drivers. Bad move. I put in the CD and did the install. Agreed to reboot after the installation and the computer hung. When Vista hangs – that’s it. Control-Alt-Delete does nothing. The only thing that works if the Reset button. It still wouldn’t boot up “normally” so I booted up in Safe Mode and uninstalled the motherboard drivers.
Now I could boot up again. So I went on the internet and looked for the Mach Speed Vista drivers for the motherboard. I attempted to download them. About half way through the 15Mb file, the computer hangs. Mouse arrow doesn’t move. No hard drive activity. The computer just sits there. I hit to power off switch.
Back to a GOOD computer and I downloaded the motherboard drivers and the audio drivers and put them on a Secure Digital card. I booted up the Vista computer is Save Mode and was able to copy the driver files over from the SD card. I did the install and finally I was able to boot “normally”. I had to reinstall the drivers from the “normal” mode and now the computer seems to work. It still tells me that my USB port could be faster if I install 2.0 but it doesn’t tell me where I can get it. Later.
Windows Vista Home (upgrade) is pretty but if you don’t have a few days to spend trying to do the install, I would suggest if you want Vista, just buying a computer with it already installed.
Hunting coyotes or grounds quirrels would have been a lot more fun.
I still have Vista running on the test computer and I am learning the new frustrations one by one.
As long as I have a couple of GOOD computers running I was able to get the drivers for the motherboard, the USB Wireless adapter, the 5 button IntellMouse, and audio system off the Internet. I have played around with it more and it is essentially Windows XP Pro with a face lift and a lot of pretty makeup. The sound from my speakers is very good. Setting up the Virtual memory location, Paths and how it displays a folder view is the same as XP put it takes a different path getting to where the settings can be made. It took quite a while to find out how to display the full path and the file name extensions when viewing a folder, but I finally found out how. I still haven't cracked how to display the status bar at the bottom. I was able to use Ghost 2003 to write the complete image of the C: drive off to the E: partition. My old Ghost 2002 would not find a NTFS partition. I might just like Vista yet.... Maybe.
Trying to implement the old "set" command is still possible but must be done quite differently.
Good Hunting... from Varmint Al
Here is my Computer Page: http://www.varmintal.com/acomp.htm