So, this weekend I fired up my old Dell Inspiron 5100 and decided to give Vista a try. Overall, the installation experience went amazingly smooth, but I must be perfectly honest and admit that I didn't even attempt to go the upgrade route since my previous experiences with upgrading have always been problematic. To make a long story short, I gave the system a compete lobotomy by reformatting the drive and starting with a clean install of Vista Business Edition. By the way, a single Vista installation will actually support all four flavors of the OS (Ultimate, Home Premuim, Business, and Home Basic). It's appears that it's the access key that controls the feature set that is enabled on your particular system that seperates a Ultimate from say a Home Basic install. This allows you to be able to upgrade the OS by simply purchasing and inputing a new access key as opposed to having to re-install or upgrade the OS software again.
So, how's the experience...
Overall, the system is running extremely smooth and is performing well with just the basic installation of the OS itself. Haven't stressed it or messed around too deeply with it, but I think its working great coming straight out of the install with native device drivers only. Only bad news is that the Inspiron 5100 has such gimpy video, I didn't get to experience the beauty of the new Aero (i.e. also referred to as "glass") interface. With that being said, that is the only complaint I have about Vista. It really doesn't look all that great if you've got a whimpy video card like the 5100 has. Naturally, I'm anticipating that video performance will most likely improve once ATI releases a new driver for the Mobile Radeon 5400, but I'll have to wait and see (by the way, I'm not holding my breathe on that). I'm still getting used to the layout of the new Start menu, but that will improve over time. I'll be honest and admit that I had to change back to the Classic Start menu in order to perform a few Admin functions such as enable IIS and manage services, but, eventually, I'll figure out where these functions are in the new menu system.
As for other software, I also installed the following apps once the Vista installation was complete:
- Visual Studio 2005
- Visual SourceSafe 2005
- SQL Server 2005 Standard Edition
and they seem to be running fine as well. There were a few trivial incompatibilities that you have to manage; however, I do like the fact that Microsoft warns you about them upfront during the installation process so you can take care of them ASAP. Haven't installed any games, but I've heard some grumblings about performance and incompatibility issues. Then again, this is my home dev box so I don't plan on messing with games on it. Gaming is strictly for my Dell XPS that I'm not brave enough to upgade to Vista....yet...