Vista Advice

Hello, All

I setout to install my MSDN Vista Ultimate on my Sager 8790 yesterday as an upgrade, not a full install. I had run the Upgrade Advisor several times to discover known incompatibilities and warnings. I had uninstalled all known incompatible software (not the warnings) and the only item of major concern was the unknown compatibility with the Promise Ultra 100 Controller. “There is no compatibility data available for this device. For more information, go to the device manufacturer's website or Windows Marketplace, or contact your retailer.” Not a show stopper, right? I also increased my free HD space past the 15GB required to 18GB free.

Upgrade Attempt #1.
“You must make the following changes before installing Windows
Close Windows installation and contact the device manufacturer for updated driver software for these devices:
SCSI and RAID controllers: Promise Technology Inc. Ultra IDE Controller
The compatibility report will be saved to the current Windows desktop.”

So, I guess it was a show stopper.

Based on advice in this forum, I changed my IDE driver from the Windows XP default (produced by Promise, distributed by Microsoft) to the RAID driver on the Sager support page. XP didn’t seem to care either way. I skipped re-running the Upgrade Advisor since it is clearly useless, went right to Attempt #2.

Upgrade Attempt #2.
All in all flawless, but SLOW. I need to say that again. SLOW!!!. About three hours in Windows doing scans, copying files, doing some sort of file collection, then getting the first 20% of the way through unpacking files. Then a reboot to a DOS mode to continue. Then 50 minutes (I kid you not) stuck at 21% of unpacking files. Just as I was doing some Googling to see if I should force-reboot the sucker, it finally ticked to 22% and then quickly proceeded to 80% (quickly being a relative term). Since there were two more steps after that, I gave up and went to bed.

When I got back to it this morning, it was ready for the first login. I put in my XP Passsword and it started it’s “getting ready for first login” song & dance. An HOUR later I was ready to click something.

Basic Vista experience so far.
SLOW SLOW SLOW SLOW
Painful
Right click a folder? Maybe the menu pops up. Maybe I wait five minutes and the menu pops up. Maybe Explorer crashes. Now that I’ve worked with it for about five hours, the explorer crash seems to be it’s favorite option.
That 18GB of free space when I started? Down to 10.6GB free, now.

Free memory? NONE. 800MB of memory used by the system, before booting a single app, before turning on IIS. On first boot. Swap to disk. Swap file 1GB and growing.. shrinking … growing…

Visual Studio 2005? Known incompatibilities. First few attempts to load a Web Application project fail. About to get it working when….

Oh, Windows Update has some fixes ready for me to install already, how nice. One of them is a new graphics driver, which is great, because I can’t get my external monitor working. Sure, let that install… wait for it… CRASH. Black screen, no visible errors. Try to reboot. Black screen. Reboot into safe mode. Pull the Rip Cord. Try to restore my TrueImage of XP. Nope, TrueImage won’t work in Safe Mode. Crash Explorer a few times in Safe Mode by daring to right-click on something. Okay, uninstall the graphics card while in safe mode, try to reboot back into Normal. Works. Great. Install Graphics Driver from ATI (Beta Vista Driver). Slowly… Slowly… works. Reboot.

Shutdown… 7 minutes.
Bootup .. 5 minutes.
Login … 6 minutes.

Try to configure external monitor from windows. Won’t work, only lists 25, 29, and 30 MHz refresh rates.

Launch ATI Control Center … 10 minutes (you think I’m making this up). Both monitors configure correctly.

Change to Classic Theme … 6 minutes. But afterward… things start speeding up slightly. Maybe I need to give this one more chance.

While I am writing this… Try to bring over my Outlook Express email into Windows Mail. Sure, I have a lot, I know.. I’ll be patient.

35 minutes into it… “Windows Mail encountered errors importing your Outlook Express messages…. You can TRY to manually import the messages”.

And so it goes on.

Oh, and it’s still SLOW.

My advice.. be happy with XP.

(Crossing fingers that I'm not jinxing myself by writing this.)

I've been working on Vista since about the time I finished my last post. With the Theme and Start Menu back to "Classic" (no Flip 3D for me), I've managed to be productive. I would say it's doing everything at about 90% of the speed I'm used to from XP, which is a huge improvement over a few hours ago.

I haven't tried to reboot or start up any apps past Excel, VS2005 (statup as Admin....), IIS, SQL 2005 Manager, Windows Mail and Trillian. But it's behaving.

I say slowly and carefully.

My Vista experience does get better day-by-day. Like you, I used ReadyBoost for a few days to some great success. Now I've upgraded my system memory to 2GB and of course that helps quite a bit. I've got Aero on and everything working fine, finally. I've seen used memory drop to as little as 450MB, but it seems to like to hover around 700 to 800MB for no real reason. It's at 889MB right now. But what I've noticed is that the system uses much more memory, but it seems willing to give it up. I've loaded some games, watched the slow process of the system winding down memory use to give it to the game, and then exited the game only to see the system keep working without reclaiming that memory.

My 8790 seems to have no problems with Sleep (suspend or hybernate), Shutdown, or reboot.

Have you looked for beta drivers directly from ATI or Nvidia? I've got Vista beta drivers from ATI and while they arn't bug-free, they get the job done.

Well, I guess anything is possible, but I know it wasn't an exaggeration, much less a huge one. I just changed my RAM, so I guess I'll never know about that one. The other possibility is I just have a lot more stuff installed (three versions of Visual Studio, to start) and the installer does something with each program installed. I can't run MobileMeter anymore, but I know I wasn't overheating before Vista. I don't seem to be now, either (not a whole lot of fan use). I suspect it could be my harddrive having problems. How could I tell it my Processor was "failing"?

Did you do an install or an upgrade?