WetLeather Motorcycle Rider Information

"Eh. It works."
Using my trusty Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop with Core[1] Duo 2.0GHz CPU, 2GB RAM, 5400RPM 100GB SATA drive, Dell Ultra Sharp widescreen 1920x1200, Intel 945GM Express video, Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG wireless network) I made backups of all my data and settings using SyncToy. Just for good measure, I booted my customized "BartPE" boot CD and made a Ghost image of the XP partition to an external USB drive. Then after moving the partitions around and re-sizing them, I was ready to install Vista w/SP1.

Except that my first DVD burned from my download from MSDN didn't work. It got about half-way through the initial "copying files..." process and then claimed some file was missing or couldn't be copied. So back to MSDN Subscriber Downloads for a fresh copy of the .iso. With a new DVD, it worked fine. Installed the system to a newly-formatted partition, and retained an alternate boot selection for the XP partition - though of course it blew away Grub and thus took the Linux partitions out of the boot menu. I know how to fix that, later.

It took a couple of hours to run through the installation and configuration and Windows Update. Yes, even with the freshest slipstreamed SP1 package, there were a couple of updates. Drivers, actually. Even before the Windows Update, however, SP1 has drivers for all the hardware in this laptop. This was not true of the initial RTM release, for which I had needed to download several drivers from Dell's website in order to get set up. In particular, I remember having a helluva time persuading it to set up wireless networking. No drama this time - I did the obvious stuff and it just worked, WPA/TKIP to my "vintage" Linksys WRT54G v1. I also remember having trouble with getting the right video driver and settings with the initial Vista RTM. Not so this time - it "just worked".

Among the first few things I did was to disable UAC (User Account Control), which is that famously noisy/nosy feature that prompts you every time you do something that it thinks should require administrator ("root") permissions. Maybe I'll try re-enabling it now that I've got everything loaded and installed. But maybe not. It sure made things a lot less annoying during the various setups.

Using "Easy Transfer", the Vista version of XP's "Files and Settings Transfer Wizard" really did make transferring all my data files and program settings very easy and slick. Because I was transferring from an alternate boot setup on the same computer, it took a few more steps than the default "hook the old computer to the new with a cable" method, but with a USB external disk (my only handy thumb drive wasn't big enough), it was very simple and straightforward. It took maybe 30 minutes to get 2.4GB of data files and all my program settings, bookmarks, preferences (including Office configuration) all set up in Vista, including time to reboot to XP and then reboot again back to Vista.

Installing Office 2007 was also straightforward and not awfully time-consuming. Since the settings and prefs had already been set, Outlook came right up and connected to my IMAP servers and to Google Calendar and everything "just worked".

Since I was doing a "fresh" install, I figured I might as well upgrade Firefox to FF3 Beta 3. By many reports, it's actually more stable than the FF2 that I was using. This isn't meant to be a review of FF3, but I'll note that I do like it, and it seems to work fine for most of what I've tried. So far, so good - except that the add-on for del.icio.us Bookmarks that I use almost exclusively hasn't been updated to be compatible with FF3 yet. However, ScribeFire - the blogging add-in that I'm using to write this - obviously has been so updated.

Installing and updating Quicken 2006, iTunes 7, Logitech's QuickCam app, PaintShop Pro 8, SyncToy and various other applications also seems to have gone smoothly and relatively quickly.

FWIW, Vista gives this machine a User Experience Rating of 3.0, mostly because of the "low end" graphics subsystem.  I remember when I first installed Vista on this same machine, back just after Vista's initial RTM. It took a couple of days and several boots before it quit churning and stalling and running slow. Once it settled down, it was fine - but that initial couple of days was slow and clunky. I cannot recall whether I had upgraded the RAM to 2GB before I installed the original Vista, or not. I know the machine originally had just 1GB, but I'm too lazy to go searching for the receipt for the upgrade. And I'm not quite sure when I started using an SD card for ReadyBoost with that original Vista install. I know, that's very unscientific of me. I apologize.

Anyway, soon after first boot with SP1, I inserted my SanDisk Extreme "Ducati Edition" (hey, it was a Christmas present) 4GB SD card and told Vista to use it all for ReadyBoost. Whether that's responsible, or they actually did OS performance tuning or what, I don't know. But Vista SP1's performance on this installation has been fine from the very first boot. It feels nice and responsive. Subjectively, it does not feel slower or less responsive than XP Pro on this same machine.

The power management also appears to work flawlessly, at least so far. No more mysterious blank-screen-with-live-computer after resume. Hybrid Sleep really does work a treat when it works - and it hasn't failed yet with SP1.

Still no deathly surprises after a few days of regular usage. I used it to set up my new wireless router and new wireless bridge for my DirecTV, with no drama. Everything worked fine and was no more difficult to figure out or use than compaable XP experience. I quickly determining that it was too confusing to have two Windows environments for frequently-used things like my Quicken files, e-mail archives and passwords database (KeePass - it's multi-platform open source). So I deleted a bunch of stuff from the XP partition and used GParted from an Ubuntu LiveCD to shrink it and and grow the Vista space, and just switched over to Vista as my primary OS. I had to reinstall the Vista boot loader from the Vista DVD, but that also went smoothly and "just worked", leaving the XP partition still bootable and usable just in case.

It does take longer to cold-boot Vista than XP. And the time to go into "hybrid sleep" after I close the laptop lid is about 30 seconds, as opposed to the 5-10 seconds for XP to enter "normal" Sleep mode. I very rarely cold-boot this laptop. The time-to-sleep is a bit more bothersome, but I can live with it. I might experiment with "normal" sleep mode under Vista.