Vista PC

June 17th, 2007

Now that my PC isn’t critical to my activities, I decided to give Windows Vista a go. I started off by buying a simple new SATA harddisk, which should have been exceptionally easy to install until I discovered that it came supplied with the disk and an engrish manual/2-by-4 sheet of paper with nonsense-instructions printed, and absolutely nothing else. Because I have SATA cables and jumper pins growing in magical pots ten to the dozen here it was fine…

Actually what this really meant was I had to go on an unnecessary search for these things but eventually all was fine and I had a third HDD within my PC. I attempted to install Vista on the new disk while disconnecting the old ones so as to preserve my XP setup but something in the BIOS didn’t like this, and it ended up not detecting the SATA drive.

I left it for about a week before trying again (XP having developed the good old ‘NTLDR.dll is missing’ thing again which I am very used to). Anyway, a reset to factory settings for the BIOS sorted the SATA drive’s issues and Vista was installed pretty easily after this point, however with my old drives still connected. Amazingly, it could tell this, and instantly provided a dual-boot system with XP.

I had a play about in Vista and all seemed fine apart from the fact Creative deem my sound card (the SB Live!) too old to provide new drivers so I am left with stereo rather than the wonderful 5:1 surround I have become accustomed to. Vista rated my graphics performance as a 5.9 which is quite remarkable for such ageing technology as AGP. But eventually I grew tired of messing about with it and decided to give booting in XP a shot.

XP had died in the process. I’m not sure how many times I’ve repaired or reinstalled XP but I gave that a go only to get so far before being asked to put in what I thought was my XP cd key. It didn’t work. And in half completing the XP repair, Vista disappeared as well.

Fortunately, Vista’s recovery system is a little more effective, and within 30 seconds of running the DVD it was back! Later I realise that in fact, I was using the wrong key for XP and so have since repaired it, and have a functioning dual boot between XP and Vista. Somehow XP survived being killed as it always does (its actually indestructible when used properly) and Vista isn’t too bad either.