Windows Vista:

I just did an upgrade from XP and thought I'd share a little info from the experience.

First off be it known that it took 3+ hours to upgrade mine, but have a 200 gig drive that is 3/4+ full so that may have had something to do with it.

Second there is a feature I had not heard of that is important. As it is upgrading it makes a list of problems that your system has and keeps track till the upgrade is finished. When finished it will then go to the internet to find fixes for your problems. It may not be able to fix all, but it fixed some of mine.

Example: I have two tv cards on my rig - one for tv and one for security cameras. Both are very old and neither worked after the upgrade. After the problem solver had time to work the security camera one started working :thumbs:

The point of this, is get your internet up and working first before doing anything else so it can do its thing.

Of course my wireless card would not work so I did not know all of this until AFTER a lot of frustration in trying to get things to work. I went out and found a wireless card and put it in and all sorts of things started happening including a 150 gig download - which included some of these fixes and many Vista updates.

Vista is quirky because of my Win 3.1, Win workgroups, win95, win 98 XP use but all in all it is quite user friendly - if you forget about how you want to run things and go with their way :laugh:

The upgrade itself went quite well compared to some I've done in the past. It picked up my desktop picture, and almost all of the settings. Missed my network setup though that may have been due to the reinstall of new wireless card software.

As to price, I found it on Ebay (Vista Home Premium upgrade) for 66.00 which was about 50-70 lower than usual on Ebay and about 75 below retail around here.

There is a possibility of going back to XP however when mine did its thing it did not create a "windows.old" directory for that purpose and I could not go back. There are instructions on MS site if you ever need them. I was not given the option to save old settings/files as I had been in past upgrades.

 

Just another item. If you sync a pocket computer with your computer, try to sync but when it doesn't work go to start/programs/accessories/sync center and see if it is listed. You might want to read in the help file.

It will download some items and install them. Try to sync again.

There is also a mobile device center that you should find if you just type it in the window at the bottom of the start menu.

 

Not sure I'd be that hard on it, but it definitely has some drawbacks. I think they have way too much program for the average person. I've been using computers since the timex sinclair days and I'm taking a lot of time just to figure out things. They have the fancy program, but seem not to have done well on the help files.

I would say that the help is much better than any other version, but they didn't go far enough.

Renaming a few things is a foolish action in my mind. Like calling Network places Network locations. Go looking for help and you don't know what to type in.
It did a great job of fixing the problems with my older equipment. Only one tv card fails to work. It works, but the software won't :tonofbricks: I can hear it in media center and can see it in my security camera software so it is working but just can't control it :laugh:

I wanted to get it since I teach a basic computer class and most of the people are without a computer or wanting to upgrade and most on the market today come with Vista - need to know something about it even though I will never master it from what I've seen.

I'm not sure I'd recommend it to most people I know unless they were just starting with computers.

My wife's unit won't save settings when you change them to the system when it reboots. MS site speaks of disk protection, but as yet I have not been able to find where you change the way it protects :laugh:

 

I'm very used to vista now, never know its there except when it won't install some windows update :laugh:

When first installed MS browser would barely run. It would redraw itself several times very slowly and finally get a page up. Couple days into the upgrade it stopped opening completely. It says MS knows there was a problem and will let me know when they have a fix. Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting - thank goodness for firefox - waiting .........

Couple of days ago I got an MS explorer toolbar update and it won't install :laugh:

I emailed them and told them the update they designed for their program that is supposed to run in their OS but won't will not install - guess we all have our problems :thumbs:

In the Bible program issue, you might try reinstalling the programs. I haven't had any problems with any of mine either, then again I use an old Bible companion, e-sword and Bakers library. Others might be a problem.

Also you might go to the Bible main program file right click on the .exe icon and ask for properties, then on compatability tab click in box to have it run in XP mode. Might get it to work.