It's hard to believe it has been five years already, isn't it? It was roughly five years ago that I first installed Windows XP. I wasn't an early adopter because I had been burned as an early adopter of Windows NT some years before, and my skepticism was well justified by the various issues that ultimately led to the release of service pack one. I was going to approach Vista in exactly the same way, but then my boss bought me an upgrade copy of Windows Vista Ultimate Edition as a reward for my work on a particular project. The rest, I suppose, is history.
Part of it stems from the fact that I'm generally cautious when it comes to my computers. I depend on them for a lot of things, and I wanted to minimize the disruption. So even though I was suffering from an awful case of the curious, I waited a couple of weeks after I received my copy of Vista to install it. The reason was simple: I wanted to do my homework before I popped that shiny, new disc into the drive. Microsoft had been working on Vista for five-plus years. That's many years and many millions of lines of code, any one of which could screw up my system beyond repair—the one task at which Microsoft products truly excel.
And I have to say I'm really glad that I did. There were four things in particular that I'm glad I knew ahead of time:
If you're asking why any of these things matter, let me explain. As a consequence of (1), Vista will overwrite your boot sector, even if you're not doing a mere upgrade, which will make it impossible for you to boot the old operating system without Vista. Think about it. Even if you go buy a brand new hard drive just for Vista, it's going to overwrite your current boot drive's boot sector in favor of its own boot loader. Should you later decide you don't like Vista and wipe it from the new hard drive, you'll be unable to boot back to the old operating system.
There is a fix for just such an issue, of course, but it's not a pleasant one (i.e., manually repairing the boot sector from the recovery console). Suffice it to say that I didn't want Vista to hose my other drives. I had two different installations of Windows XP on two separate hard drives, and I wanted them both to be intact and working without any fuss. To be clear, my reading indicates that Vista will politely restore the boot sector if you uninstall it, but that assumes a successful uninstall, of course, and that's not an assumption I was willing to trust.
As regards (2), I didn't have any cause to worry because I have kept my motherboard's BIOS up to date. But I have read postings and complaints from several users about the Vista installation process getting into the hardware detection phase, halting with errors due to old BIOS code, and then leaving the user's system in a broken state, which is only complicated by the whole overwriting-the-boot-sector thing. The lesson is that if you're thinking about Vista, be darned sure your BIOS is up to date or have an emergency rescue disk to restore the boot sector.
I was also gratified to learn of (3) because I wanted neither to destroy my existing OS nor waste my time installing a copy of Windows XP nor have its product key deactivated in the process. I've tried the upgrade options with previous Microsoft operating systems, and not once has it ever worked correctly. It's true that some settings are transferred correctly, and some drivers are updated properly, and some applications are recognized, but that's not good enough. I don't know about you, but if I'm going to go to all the trouble of installing a new operating system, I don't want to fight freaky compatibility problems because it didn't get the upgrade right.
But more important, a couple of things I read about the Vista install indicated that upgrading an existing operating system would forever invalidate its product key with Microsoft. I paid for every copy of Windows XP that I use, and I wasn't interested in having my ability to use it degraded or destroyed merely because I purchased Vista. I mean, what if I didn't like Vista? It's not like I could return it for a refund—even if it hadn't been a gift, stores don't accept opened software—and if it deactivated my old OS key, I'd essentially be stuck with something I didn't want.
I'm happy to say I avoided both of these problems merely by using a neat little trick to do a clean install from my upgrade disc. And don't worry, I'll provide a link to the step-by-step instructions in case you would like to do the same.
Finally, item (4) is particularly irritating becuase it makes it so important to get everything right before you activate. With Windows XP, Microsoft introduced their awful activation code, which has required me to jump through hoops on the telephone more times than I care to remember. But I'll give Microsoft this much credit: every time I have been forced to call and speak with a representative during a reinstall, I have been given an activation code. I've sometimes had to explain to them that the reason I've had to reinstall yet again is because their still-steaming-pile-of-dung operating system hosed itself, but I have always been given an activation code.
With Vista, the situation is supposedly different; this time around Microsoft is allowing one mistake at most. Once get one additional activation with Vista and then you're done. The activation code has allegedly been improved to the point where only swapping out the motherboard itself will require a reactivation, but I'll believe that when I see it. Worse, it seems that merely installing certain software can "invalidate your license", which will eat up that precious reactivation if you want to avoid "reduced functionality mode". I find it hard to believe that Microsoft is going to stick to their guns, given the outcry such a ridiculous policy will undoubtedly produce, but I won't ever underestimate their ability to screw the paying customer.
Suffice it to say that I'm very glad I knew of these things ahead of time. They saved me a lot of time, effort, and grief.
Having done my homework, the day of terror was finally at hand. I disconnected my two working hard drives, connected up my new, blank hard drive, popped the Vista install DVD into the drive, and powered up the computer. The plain, old, ugly Windows NT installation screen greeted me, but it was replaced in pretty short order with the far more attractive Vista installer. I was careful to take the steps as outlined in Paul Thurrott's column on the subject of doing a clean Vista install from an upgrade edition, which amount (roughly) to leaving the product key blank and un-checking the box to activate automatically.
Once I made it through the most basic couple of dialogs, the install process kicked off and started copying files. What I absolutely couldn't believe was the speed. Microsoft has done a great job with Vista's install from the perspective of a user. I've installed Windows XP more times than I can count, and it typically takes between thirty and forty-five minutes from start to finish, no matter how fast the machine. Really old, slow machines take longer, of course, but I was fully expecting to spend close to an hour installing Vista.
I kid you not when I state that I was sitting at my new Vista desktop in an unbelievable fifteen minutes. I was so astonished you could have knocked me over with a feather! I don't know why the Vista installer is so much faster, but it is an outright speed demon compared to the Windows XP installer. I kept expecting the other shoe to drop, needing to run through fifty more setup steps, or something equally ridiculous, but it was done. Complete. Finished. All in fifteen minutes. In a mere quarter of an hour from when I started, I was sitting at the Vista desktop for the first time.
And that's when it hit me: I was sitting at the Vista desktop. And more to the point, I wasn't sitting at a postage-stamp sized Vista desktop; the installer had properly identified my video components (dual NVIDIA 7800 GTX cards) and set them to run at my monitor's native resolution, 1600 x 1200 x 32 bpp. I was utterly floored by that. Every other Windows installer I have ever used has insisted on leaving me at 800 x 600 at best. Vista got my video right, the first time, without asking any questions or any prompting on my part. I didn't have to install video drivers or anything.
And that's when it hit me: the Explorer window I had opened, expecting to need video drivers, was showing me other computers on my home network! The install speed was stunning, the fact that Vista got my video right was unprecedented, and the fact that my network was working was the straw that broke the camel's back. I literally browsed a few shares on my server to make sure I wasn't imagining what I was seeing. I visited a few web sites. My network was working, and I hadn't done a thing; I didn't install drivers, I didn't configure anything, it just worked.
You have to understand, with the exception of MS-DOS versions prior to v3.3, I have installed every single Microsoft operating system. I have installed all versions of MS-DOS v3.3 and after, Windows 1.x, Windows 2.x, Windows 286, Windows 386, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups (a.k.a. Windows 3.11), Windows 95 (including the OEM service releases), Windows 98 (including the OEM service releases), Windows ME, every single version of Windows NT and Windows Server, and more instances of Windows XP than I care to count.
In short, I have been dealing with Microsoft's brain-dead installers now for more than twenty years, and not once in those hundreds of installs spanning more than two decades has a single Microsoft OS ever configured its network correctly. Something has always been wrong: the card isn't seen, the drivers don't install correctly, the card isn't configured properly, the TCP/IP stack doesn't work, etc. Windows Vista is the very first Microsoft OS ever that installed correctly and worked immediately with my video and network right out of the box, without asking me anything and without any prompting or fussing from me.
I was caught in the same kind of disbelief that must have gripped Bertrand Russel after death as he stood before the God he had denied for so long. Seriously, it was almost a religious experience. Microsoft has actually made the Vista installer work. It only took them two-plus decades to make an operating system that can actually cope with the most basic aspects of graphical computing (i.e., the video and the network), but they have finally done it. It's astounding to me.
Kudos to Microsoft for getting the Vista installer right. Without question, it provides the very best installation experience of any OS they have ever released.
I didn't think it was even possible for me to be any more surprised, but the next time I rebooted Windows Vista did something else I couldn't believe: it offerred me a solution. Installing a Microsoft OS has always been a process fraught with trial, error, and pain. It never gets the video or the network right, it rarely gets the motherboard right, and the user is stuck installing driver after driver, rebooting constantly for hours until all the hardware is working. And most important, the burden of identifying the correct driver files and installing them properly falls squarely on the user.
Not so with Vista. Of the components that were listed in device manager as being nonfunctional for various reasons, the one that surprised me most was my Creative Labs X-Fi Fatality edition sound card. Creative Labs is the dominant vendor for PC audio cards, after all, and it's not like Vista came out of nowhere, given its five-plus year development cycle. So I was surprised and disappointed to find that Vista apparently had no drivers for my card.
But like I said, the next time I rebooted Vista it offered me a solution: it told me it had determined that my sound card was a Creative Labs X-Fi card, and it asked if I wanted to solve the problem. Stunned, I selected the option to solve the problem and was quickly taken to the correct web site from which a beta driver could be downloaded. I installed said beta driver, and my sound card was working. No other operating system from Microsoft has ever provided anything remotely approaching helpful as regards hardware installation and configuration. Plug and play is still more like plug and pray, even as we approach the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century. I couldn't believe it.
To be fair, I brought the dual-boot problem on myself by doing a clean install with my other hard drives disconnected. Had I left those drives connected, Vista would likely have provided hooks to the old, Windows XP boot loaders, so that I could have easily booted to my old operating system(s). But I didn't want those drives' boot sectors overwriten. I wanted absolute rollback capability; i.e., if anything went wrong with Vista, I wanted to be able to unplug the new hard drive, re-connect the old hard drives, and boot back into my old systems without a hitch.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who will approach Vista with such caution, so it's worth explaining how I got dual-boot working after the fact. First, let me give the conceptual explanation. From my experience, I believe Vista's new boot loader reads its data from the BCD store, displays the various options (if more than one), and supports previous versions of Windows through their boot loaders on the current drive.
In other words, it seems that one must have all the components for the old Windows NT/XP boot loader in the root folder of the boot drive with Vista in order to work. Since I had done a clean install on a blank drive, I didn't have any of that, nor did I have the option to boot to an earlier version. I didn't know what was required at the time, so the following are the steps I took to solve my problem.
I suspect that one could simply use VBP to add the earlier version of Windows option, copy the files, and plug the correct values into BOOT.INI in one step, but I had to go through the process to figure it all out. The result is that I have a two-level boot menu. The first level asks me whether I want to run Vista or an earlier version of Windows. If I choose the latter option, then I get the same old boot menu I had for years under Windows XP, which lets me choose between two different installations.
As hard as it is for me to believe, Vista inherits the manifestly absurd and stupid memory limitations of Windows XP. As I was disappointed to discover some time ago, Windows XP SP2 lops off the fourth gigabyte of memory for stupid reasons. Rather than do things right, Microsoft took the quickest path to shoving SP2 out the door and screwed every user with 4 GB of RAM in his system. That's why I had two installations of Windows XP in the first place; i.e., one of them is still running Windows XP SP1, which lets me use 3.75 GB of the 4 GB in my computer.
I attended two different Microsoft launch events prior to installing Vista, and at both of them I was assured by the presenters that the memory limitations of Windows XP were a thing of the past. They were confident that Vista would use the whole 4 GB in my system without any issues. As one can imagine, I was pretty pissed to discover that Vista will use 2.5 GB at most. The top gigabyte is lopped off for sake of compatibility with stupid drivers, while the other 512 MB is chewed up interfacing with my dual video cards.
Adding insult to injury, not only does Vista fail to use all my memory, and does a worse job at chewing up memory to talk to my video cards than Windows XP, SLI is not supported under Vista with the drivers currently available from NVIDIA. I have subsequently become aware of a beta driver release, which is available for download on nZone, that provides limited support for SLI under Vista, but the fact that there are no official drivers from NVIDIA is practically criminal. Yes, I realize Vista changes the whole graphics system, but NVIDIA has had years to get drivers in place. This is fracking ridiculous.
Vista is supposed to be the operating system for gaming, thanks to all its under-the-hood changes and the addition of DirectX 10, but the games I have installed to date play at about 60% of the performance I see under Windows XP because of the SLI issue alone. I will detail all the problems I've had installing and getting software to work in a subsequent article, but it was obvious to me within hours of getting my installation working that Vista is not yet ready for prime time. Gamers beware!
On the subject of drivers, Vista does not seem to ship with drivers for the HP LaserJet 1320 printer. It's not exactly an obsolete printer either; I bought mine roughly four years ago. But the first time I tried to print something under Vista, I was surprised to discover that I couldn't add my printer. I went through the steps, browsing to the correct server to add a shared printer, but the process always failed as soon as it tried to communicate with the printer.
When I checked the HP web site for support, I was surprised to find the printer listed as not having native support in Vista. Thankfully, I thought at the time, a new driver was provided by HP. I downloaded their driver, ran the install, and got the very same, unhelpful results. I even tried disabling the User Account Control (UAC) and running the install as the Adminstrator, but it didn't make any difference.
I did ultimately get the printer working, but only by going through a strange set of steps. The details, for those who find themselves in the same boat, are as follows.
I don't know what I'm giving up by using the PCL 5 driver, as opposed to the PCL 6 driver that installs cleanly and automatically in Windows XP, but that was my only choice. It's hard for me to believe that such a popular printer has no native support in Vista, and that the drivers from HP don't work at all for such a common configuration. It's also completely mystifying to me why I have to add a networked printer as a local printer on a "local" port whose name is a network address! It's like some idiot at Microsoft was trying to figure out how many contradictions he could pack into one task.
Finally, on the roster of problems, is the complete lack of hardware support for some of my devices. I have some pro-audio hardware in this machine, an RME Hammerfall DSP interface to be more precise, and there are no drivers available for it. I've read some anecdotal accounts of user successes in getting it to work under Vista, but I'm not even going to try. The vendor has made no committment to provide Vista drivers, and I think I'm simply screwed on this count.
I could go on for another dozen pages about my experiences with Vista, but this essay is focused solely on the installation process and the most basic set up tasks. Perhaps the best way to summarize is to say that Vista installs refreshingly quickly and does a good job at configuring a clean setup. It's ridiculous that drivers are either crappy or unavailable for such common hardware from big vendors, but presumably that situation will only improve with time.
03/20/2007