Like everyone else who runs a windows box for development, I’ve been psyched about the new Windows Operating System, Vista. Normally I am not an early adopter of Windows OS’s, but it’s been so long since I got to play with something new from MS that wasn’t an office installation that I decided to give it a whirl.

 This article is the catalog of the results of that experiment.

I purchased my Vista license from the digital locker, so I can download it again if I need to and reinstall without all those cumbersome DVD’s. I’d never done it before, so I gave that a shot. The download for Vista was in three parts, the core of which was a 2.3GB download that took a couple of hours over my DSL connection, nothing too severe.

 I ran the windows Vista upgrade advisor, and it advised me I needed to uninstall Nero before I could upgrade to Vista, that my video card would not handle the new Aero GUI, and that a few of my programs might possibly maybe have configuration issues after the upgrade. The language used to describe the possible incompatibilities was gentle enough that it seemed ok to just go ahead with the upgrade.

Operating System upgrades take a long time, longer than a clean install, and for good reason. When the OS is attempting to upgrade, it’s simultaneously trying to put in the new while preserving the old configs and settings, so it makes sense that it will take forever. I defragged, cleaned up the disk space, and ran the upgrade.

The upgrade ran for about two and a half hours, and everything seemed to be progressing nicely, until the last reboot. When the screen said “preparing to run windows for the first time”, I was really excited to try out the new OS. What I saw a minute later, though was “Upgrade was not installed successfully, your old Operating System is being restored”.

It restored my XP Pro installation precisely to where it had been before I started the Vista install, so I couldn’t complain too much. I was disappointed, but figured I had missed something simple. After all, the advisor had told me I was ok to upgrade, so I figured I was ok to upgrade. I ought to know better.

So I did some research on the MS website, in some discussion forums, and read over what little information there was to be had so far on the internet regarding Vista upgrades and installs. I saw other people with the same issues, and got the general impression that I needed to uninstall all of the possibly conflicting programs on my machine before I could upgrade. So that’s what I did and, long story short, had the same result another 3 hours later.

Still determined to use my new $200 operating system, I backed up all of my development folders, files, and settings, and did a clean install. This one took 2 hours, and I had a shiny new Vista installation on my computer.

Something, however, seems to have changed in the definition of “clean” install, because Vista backed up my old operating system in a folder named windows.old that took up half my hard drive, and left all of my custom folders under root (C:\) completely untouched. I dunno if it’s just me, but I had expected, you know, maybe a format, something to justify being a “clean” install. But nope, it only touched things past the root of the C drive, which it was easy enough to fix, just a minor annoyance.

Since I am a web programmer and 90% of my work is in PHP/MySQL, the first step to getting productive again was an installation of Apache 2. While I was installing it, I was asked for permission to continue from the OS about thirty times, and granted it each and every time. Then, at the end of the Apache installation, it told me it couldn’t start, there was no installed Apache service.

 ”Hmm”, I thought. “I know I just installed that.” Back to google I went, and sure enough, it was the new “Secure” feature in Vista, a bodyguard with a bad attitude named “User Access Control”. The function of the UAC is to make sure that nothing can happen to your machine without your permission. Which is great, and reminds me of Unix and Linux and Mac, except that when you grant permission on those OS’s, it actually gives whatever you’re doing permission. The UAC seems, at least in the case of my Apache install, to have decided I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about when I said yes, and denied the installation of the service because it knew better than I did.

 Luckily, the UAC was easy to turn off. So now I can actually run my machine, I just get a popup every five minutes or so telling me how unsafe my machine is because I don’t have UAC turned on. That’s irritating, I think, but I still pressed on.

I run a Gateway 7330GZ Notebook as my general use machine, to write PHP code and build and deploy my .NET applications. Gateway does not have the correct Video or Sound drivers for Vista yet, and support has told me they don’t know when they’ll be coming out. So that’s two mistakes: One by Gateway for not getting on the ball with their driver development, and one on MS for not even setting up the pretense of backward compatibility. I have to use an external monitor with a generic driver to have a proper display, since the 1280×768 laptop screen will not display anything but 1024×768 on Vista at the moment, which just makes my head hurt.

I also have no sound for the time being, and oddly discomfiting feeling after being so used to pops and clicks and youtube videos and listening to my collection of music.

Having worked out the WAMP environment for development, I move on to VS.NET, which I run the 2003 version of. Immediately, Vista tells me there is a known compatibility issue with 2003, so back to google I go. Turns out it’s just a couple of quirky things, nothing serious, so I install it anyway. Been using it since with no issue, so the compatibility issues are something I can’t speak to yet.

Having done the .NET install, I went back to VS6 to install my old dev environments that I use to support some software I wrote back in the day and still support. While I got compatibility issues with the 2003 version of the development environment, it didn’t make a single peep about the old, archaic VS installation from 1998. What kind of logic is this, I wonder? 2003 has compatibility issues, 1998 is ok.

So far, I’ve been using Vista day in and day out, and once I turned off the UAC, it’s been good. I can’t shake the feeling, however, that I spent 200 dollars for no other reason except to fumble around learning a new OS for a few weeks. I can’t use the Aero interface, I have no sound, and I can’t stand to look at my laptop screen.

There are prettier icons and things are smoother, and the networking is a thing of beauty. Downloads and uploads are a lot faster, and finally I have a system on which IE7 does not crash every time I open it. But now, regardless of the default browser set on the system, when you type an address in the address bar, it opens IE7, not your default browser.Ditto for double-clicked htm,html files. It opens IE7, even though FireFox is specified as the default browser. WTF?

Vista is going to be great, and it’s going to be adopted across the board, no doubt. It has some definite room to grow, though. Vendors need to get their drivers working, MS needs to patch some of the dumber features (like overriding the default browser), and UAC needs to work better than it does now, or the benefits derived from it will be lost because the biggest support answer on planet earth will become “Turn off UAC” by a host of companies and vendors that need access to any system resources to do their job.

I’m not going back to XP, but I’m not enjoying the experience a whole bunch yet. I need my drivers, and without Aero, how do I know I’m not looking at XP? Prettier icons? A deskbar on the right I replaced with google desktop immediately, because google desktop works and is easier to configure? It looks just like XP with a different wait cursor, unless you have a top of the line video card and can run Aero. And I don’t know what that looks like, because I don’t.

~A!