I have a new Toshiba laptop in front of me that I have to upgrade from Vista Home Basic (a.k.a. Vista Worthless Edition) to Vista Business.First of all, how are you supposed to open those stupid retail Vista boxes? Sure they look pretty, but my boss ended up using a knife and breaking off some plastic tabs in the process of getting it open.Secondly, I open up the laptop, it comes out of sleep mode, the resolution changes to hide the taskbar, and if I move my mouse to the bottom of the screen to try and find the taskbar weird digital artifacts appear on the screen as well as a ghost mouse cursor. Freaky.I press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to reboot, and there isn’t a reboot option. I choose logout instead, which works, but I still don’t have an option to reboot (and the weird screen artifacts persist).
So I press the Shutdown button on the keyboard which evidently just puts the laptop to sleep. I push it again, and the laptop wakes back up without the weird resolution problems or visual artifacts. Now can I reboot.
The boot screen looks like Microsoft forgot to add their logo. There’s a spot for it above the booting progress bar, but its just empty.
I’m finally in Vista, and 30 seconds after it appears usable, the UI starts responding to my clicks. So I go to Control Panel to run the Performance Testing utility to find Microsoft still truncates file names. Am I the only person who finds “Personaliz…” a silly abbreviation? Couldn’t they just drop the “…” in favor of an “e”? Ironically, after I select “Ease of Acc…” it permanently expands to its full name of “Ease of Access Center” because there’s always been plenty of room for the title.
The Performance utility rates this laptop at a 2.3 because the graphics card is a meager 128 MB ATI. The Core Duo processor and gigabyte of memory don’t make up for it evidently.
Did I mention that yesterday Compiz ran on a 4 year old laptop with a 16 MB graphics card? Same nifty features, much better performance, 1/100th the processing cost. 
Anyway, on with the upgrade. I insert the DVD and it nicely asks if I want to run setup.exe on it. I click that option and then it warns me that “An unidentified program wants access to your computer.” Unidentified? Sure enough, the setup.exe application is unsigned. Microsoft doesn’t sign their own operating system upgrade application. While I was typing that last sentence the dialog box seems to have disappeared on its own… curious… Guess I’ll try again…
The setup program works well and even includes an option to do a clean install. I choose that because there was nothing installed on the laptop anyway.
Now it just appears to be a waiting game.
In all fairness, Vista is very pretty. Microsoft has good graphic designers. I also get jealous every time I work on a computer that comes with the right drivers installed. If only Linux had the luxury of OEM support… Ubuntu Feisty Fawn seems to do a great job of driver detection out of the box without any sort of vendor support, but it still messed up on my WiFi.
I’m just hoping Dell (or any OEM) starts bundling Ubuntu with personal computers someday soon! Then we can start doing fair comparisons of Linux and Windows.
Update: I was surprised at how quickly the install finished until I realized that it was just rebooting halfway through the install. After the first reboot, the installation continues in some screen resolution that looks stretched and pixelated on this laptop.
Update 2: With “Expanding Files” at 60% and “Installing features”, “Installing updates”, and “Completing installation” to go, I’m heading home. I just noticed the setup screen is warning me that “Your computer will restart several times during installation.” Wow.
Last little tiny note: I’ve had my fill of Vista bashing for now, but in case you need more, read Aaron Bockover’s experience.
My only problem with Feisty Fawn so far is that when I turned the desktop effects on to get wobbly windows, it started failing to paint and repaint certain windows. Sure enough, the desktop effects preferences aren’t working right, so I can’t easily turn it off. Jake Dugan had the same problem, apparently.
[...] My friend Dan Coulter comments he and a co-worker had problems with it. [...]