I’ve just made the big leap to Windows Vista (x64) and Office 2007. I’ve been using Office 2007 right through the public beta process. I hadn’t done much with Vista since it’s fir public beta release up until I did my WDS document.
It’s not possible to upgrade from Window XP x64 to Vista x64. The installer tells you that you need XP with SP2. XP x64 is at SP1 but it is actually SP2 under a different name. I did install SP2 RC for XP x64 and tried to do an upgrade but that wasn’t allowed either.
I backed up my data, documented my drivers and did a fresh install. It’s not a labour intensive process at all. I entered some information at the start and left the machine to it’s own devices while I watched some NFL action from last night. I came back up and found the machine was waiting for me. But hold on … it didn’t ask me what domain I wanted to join. I had a sinking feeling.
My XP x64 installation used an Atheros Wireless Network Adapter driver for my Netgear WiFi NIC. That driver was not auto detected. I supplied the XP driver which was installed but would not start. Vista x64 requires drivers to be signed and the driver wasn’t signed. The RC1 release of Vista allows you to disable signing but that no longer works. An alternative is to boot up using <F8> and to disable the forcing of driver signing. I’m not into that. I ended up configuring RRAS on my server and setting up a hub between my PC and Wi-Fi router with server as an intermediate router. I’d been thinking of "wiring" my office anyway. I wanted better speeds for copying batches of large CR2 Canon DSLR RAW files between my PC and server. I also want to get ISA 2006 up an runnng on the server.
I added the machine to the domain. It’s fast. IE in Vista is faster than IE7 on XP x64. I like it. Things have moved around a lot. It took me ages to set a static IP on my LAN NIC. This could take some getting used to. UAC can be a little annoying.
I’ve read some threads about a problem that some have had with logon scripts and Vista. Well … my logon script did not run. People are saying it will run if you disable UAC. That’s not good. My first suspicion lies with Defender because I’ve seen it block run-time scripts before.
I then installed Office 2007. Like I said, I’ve been using it for some time now. It took a while to get used to Word but I like it now. It is much faster than the beta or RC releases. Outlook 2007 is a dream. It picked up my logon credentials and automatically searched AD to find out how to configure my profile. Outlook opened up and immediately started to configure my local cache. I like it! I downloaded the add-in for Office 2007 that allows you to save files as a PDF. That works nicely and will come in handy for my website documentation.
Now I’ve gotta get VMware, Photoshop, printer drivers, and all the other good stuff installed.