It’s been a gloomy, rainy Sunday. I tried to stave off boredom this morning by finally completing yet another home improvement project, namely adding a proper cable outlet for the cable modem in the computer room. After that, I thought I might try out the final version of Windows Vista. As I wrote that last sentence, I looked back at the other computer to see the famous Blue Screen of Death. Apparently, the upgrade didn’t go so well. hmmm… Well, looks like I’ve got some troubleshooting to do. Thankfully I made a backup of my hard drive before I started this! 🙂
update: Phew… As it turns out, it was just a driver issue. One nice feature of Vista is that if something doesn’t work out during the first reboot, you can select an option to boot your previous OS and it will be restored to the pre-upgrade state. Nice! The down side is that you have to go through the whole process all over again.
update 2: So long Vista, I barely knew ye! Well, after playing around with Vista for a couple of days, I decided to revert back to Windows XP SP2. As it turns out, my motherboard is based on NVidia’s NForce2 series chipset and while there is a basic level of driver support for it, NVidia has decided not to do any further driver development for that platform. As this is my gaming box, and I can’t live without some features like the 5.1 channel sound, Vista had to go. Instead, I’ll probably be loading it on my workstation at the office. So for any of you considering doing the upgrade, make an inventory of your hardware and research the driver support before you make the plunge!
I highly recommend using the Windows Vista upgrade advisor before trying to install on any machine. It will save you time and headaches:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/upgradeadvisor/default.mspx
I would as well. However, the advisor isn’t perfect. In addition to the advisor, I would recommend researching each major component through the manufacturer to ensure that it will be supported. In my case everything worked from a functional perspective. I could’ve lived with stereo sound instead of 5 channel, but I really didn’t want to. I could also spend money on a new sound card, but I didn’t want to do that considering the age of my PC. I’ll probably run XP for the next year or so, and then upgrade the whole machine. We’ll see, with a baby on the way I may be stuck with this machine for a while. 😉