ManiacD

I got home from work Friday and started downloading the DVD ISO of Vista RTM after a few hours came down without a hitch, I must have gotten it downloaded before the rest of the masses.

Armed with the ISO in one hand I burnt it to DVD and then spent all day Saturday backing up my hard drives and removing all the crap I’ve been accumulating since the my last big re-install. I must say there is nothing more invigorating then doing a massive clean up to put some order back into the dis-array and chaos of months if not years of different downloading and storage habits.

So with just about everything backed up and a semblance of organization back in place(at least until it gets out of hand again) the first thing I did Sunday morning was to shrink my D: drive partition from 55G to 40G so I can allocate the extra 15G to my C: Drive. The reason being is that being a bit of a purist so 99.9999% of the time I will go down the clean install path rather than upgrade path (I had upgraded the laptop I took to TechEd from RC1 to RC2 for SQL Code Camp and it ended up taking around 3 hours and did quite a lot of reboots before it completed) and also to have enough room for the applications I’m installing.

The actually installation part of Vista took about 20-25 minutes which was a hell of a lot faster when compared to the previous beta installations of Beta2, RC1 and RC2. I only needed to updated my Sound Card and TV Tuner Card drivers before I set about installing the rest of my software list below.

• Office Professional 2007
• Office Project Professional 2007
• (Not able to install the rest of the Office 2007 products until tomorrow when the new keys arrive on MSDN)
• Visual Studio 2005
• SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition
• Firefox
• Daemon Tools
• Windows Mobility Centre Beta 3
• Virtual PC 2007 Beta
• World of Warcraft (Most Important)
• and Other Miscellaneous Utilities (Winzip, WinRAR, avast! Antivirus, etc)

So with the reinstall just all done (except for the other Office Products I’m waiting on keys for) it is currently taking up approx. 26.5G of my C: Drive. I’m so glad I spent the time shrinking my D: drive so that I would have enough disk space for everything.

All and all I’m quite happy with the whole reinstall experience and I only have the following issues so far

1. Vista’s Media Centre Setup won’t detect any TV Stations. More than likely due the beta drivers for my Hauppage Nova-T 500 Dual TV Tuner Card as the station detected fine in XP Media Centre.
2. The sound in World of Warcraft has a weird popping sound occasionally when playing but that’s probably the sound card drivers (or in the case of RC1 it was the video card drivers) but as it doesn’t affect the gameplay I can live with it for the time being until later drivers are released.

With that all done and said I’m off to setting a couple of VMs with Virtual PC 2007 beta.

Technorati tags: Vista