Spent a week on the road in Japan and out of the blogosphere. Frantic pace as I met with customers and partners. This week RSA has been in full swing in San Francisco – enjoyed a blogger meet-up last night.
Spent the weekend upgrading to Vista and MS Office. Was interesting. Here is what I learnt:
- Delete all unnecessary applications before attempting to install Vista. Especially the programs loading at Start-up.
- From there-in the install was easy and painless.
- My sound driver didn’t work (Sony Viao) – trick was to delete the existing drivers and reinstall. This worked great.
- Office installed painlessly.
- Skype needed to be completely deleted and reinstalled.
- MS firewall is a bit of a nightmare. Defender and OneCare seem to have different firewalls in place and neither allow me to access the web at all. Until I figure this out I have turned them off.
- Downloaded the most recent Cisco VPN software from some University site. Crazy that I couldn’t get this from Cisco.
Vista conclusions:
- Sony Vaio runs faster.
- Vista interface is great.
- Easier and faster to access folders and files.
- Office runs faster and better.
- Outlook hangs on occasions but doesn’t crash and hangs for a bit before getting back underway.
- Overall, a bloody expensive upgrade. While you probably are better off waiting to buy Vista on a new system and Office at a lower price, if you can’t wait, it is worth it.
A general comment – I am amazed at how little support there is for Vista amongst the people I depend on. Microsoft has made no case for my IT team to do upgrades. Our outsourced email and phone provider doesn’t support Vista or Office. Cisco isn’t making its VPN client widely available. The only good guide to installing Vista I found in the blogosphere. In fact, without bloggers, I wouldn’t have been able to find answers to many of my questions.
