Vista Is Testing Me

[robertafoster]

Well as usual nothing goes like you expect it to and Vista wasn't any different when installing it on my Seagate Sata Drive which was already setup in a dual boot mode where I could boot into Window XP64 or XP Pro. It said you could dual boot if you had a version later than Win 2000 with service pak 4 installed and I was far ahead of those versions so I figured I would risk trashing my XP Pro in favor of Vista if that became the case because I really liked my XP64 which boots fast and runs very fast on my Stripped Sata drives.

Well like a dumb-a** I didn't realize that they weren't including XP64 in the equasion and I ended up trashing my XP64 OS because it lost the boot sector after installing Vista over my Segate's XP Pro.

I wasn't really all that stressed though because I was having to use XP64 for most of my stuff but I couldn't use my Canon printer with it so everytime I had to print a check or document I had to reboot into XP Pro and then back to XP64. Vista on the other hand works fine with my Canon printer and my Canon Scanner which XP64 didn't. I did however have some trade offs and sacrificed my Audigy2 in the process and my SLI with 2 6800GT cards.

No I'm not crazy, but I wasn't that impressed with the SLI to begin with as far as being able to see a noticeable difference and had to rely on benchmarking software to tell me how many FPS I was really getting and I figured that with the new Nvidia driver already out for the Aero feature in Vista SLI probably wouldn't be that far behind.

I did learn that you can not install Vista on a Sata drive in a stripped or extended format. After hours of screwing around with it I ended up going with a mirror raid. I also couldn't use any of my drivers to install Vista on a clean Sata drive. Even though it saw the drive it said it was "unavailable."

After seevral more hours of frustration (3 hours) and in and out of my BIOS a hundred times I finally installed XP pro on the new mirror drives and then installed Vista over that. Then I learned the hard way that I need to choose the one with the "0" bits on it and not the other one to boot up without getting a blue screen.

Maybe that's not what someone else would have got it done but it worked for me. I definately love the Aero features in Vista enough that I'm willing to forgo my SLI for a while and play around with it. This is definately a NEW OS and not just another upgrade. Were talking hours of playing around with it here and I still know very little about the way folders look and behaive, but I can see where once you learn, it will be worth my time. I'm currently downloading Steam to play HL2 butmy expectations are not all that high, but hopefully it will play well enough until they get some better Nvidia drivers and software.

Here is what I'm currently running for apps and my system in hopes that this will be useful to some of you and I do apologize for the lengthly message here.

System:

DFI SLI board

1 Gig Crucial Ram

2 (36) Gig Sata drives in mirror set up

23" HP 2335 Monitor

2 6800GT Graphic cards

Canon I990 Pinter

Canon Scanner

Sony DVD/CD Dual Layer Rom

AMD 4000 64

Software

Quicken 2005

MS Office 2003

MS Front Page (some issues)

Outlook 2003

Steam App

Quick Time & Pro (some issues a reboot or two)

Windows Media Player 10 (SUCKS, but can't install MusicMatch

Nvidia Raid class Controller (won't install drivers)

Multi Media Controller (won't install drivers)

PCI Input Device (won't install driver, may be coming from Audigy card)

Avast Anti Virus (runs great and is free)

I like Vista enough to live with an occasional crash or two and to put up with Media player 10 which stutters and craps out half the time. I also think that Vista lags once in a while and you have to be a little patient or you will crash a program.

And installing Apps is very tedious and very slow compared to XP64 but I think it is because the apps are independent each other and are truly seperate and don't share some common files.

ENJOY!