On Migrating to Windows Vista
February 19th, 2007
Well, I did it. I bit the bullet and installed Windows Vista on my main home computer. On first impressions, I have to say I am impressed. I was initially somewhat annoyed at the fact that there is no upgrade path from Windows XP Pro to Windows Vista Home Premium, but I was able to work around that by using the File and Settings Transfer Wizard in XP to save all of the files I really need. It was a little bit of a challenge to get those files back in place – and it was only the files, no settings made it across the void – but all seems to be running smoothly now.
I am now settling down to re-install all of the software I use on a daily basis. For the most part, this has been proceeding in a routine manner. One exception thus far has been Visual Studio 2005. While I haven’t actually gotten around to starting the program yet, Microsoft’s support site lists a whopping 48 known issues running the program on Vista. I find this number to be staggeringly high, as 2005 is the most recent version of the IDE and it is likely (if not assured) that the developers over at Redmond(India) used VS2K5 to write the damn thing.
Of course, with any major new release of a piece of software as large as Vista, there are bound to be a few issues with past versions of applications. Overall, I would have to say that I am quite impressed with what I have seen. It really does appear that they have put in some good work at making this new version a worthy upgrade. Not perfect, of course, but definitely worth an install.
