EDIT: This is NOT a "Vista sucks" thread. I'm just giving some pointers for the early adopters like me who want to get a jump on Vista.
Well I went out and dropped $240 dollars on Vista Home Premium (full edition, not upgrade) , and 3 sleepless nights later, I think I can finally sleep now. It wasn't exactly a "Wow" experience like the box says.
Here are my tips for anyone who is thinking of upgrading now. First of all, DON'T buy the upgrade, get the full version. Secondly, don't ditch your XP install, Vista simply isn't ready for the big time yet. Driver support is hit and miss, for example I had to buy a new wireless adapter since my relatively new D-Link adapter didn't have Vista drivers
.
So, you'll want to dual boot your system so you can have both XP and Vista. I HIGHLY recommend installing Vista on a separate physical drive, rather than a separate partition. Then you can choose which drive to boot from from your motherboard's bios, and have both OS's completely isolated from each other. If you absolutely have to install Vista on the same drive as XP, then create a new partition, and install Vista
from within XP. This will give you the dual boot option. Don't install Vista by booting from the dvd, otherwise Vista's crappy boot manager won't properly recognize both OS's.
The preferred method would be to unplug your XP system drive, and install Vista on it's own separate drive, then you can plug your XP drive back in and use your motherboard to pick which drive to boot from. That's what I ended up doing, and it's working perfectly now.
So now I have a system that is X10 ready
. But to be honest I'm kinda unimpressed with Vista so far. The Aero desktop is pretty cool, but I don't know how useful it's going to be other than eye-candy. And my highly tweaked XP install is definitely faster than Vista, which seems sluggish at times. And Vista has to ask for "permission" to do just about ANYTHING, which is incredibly annoying, a window pops up prompting for your permission to change anything in the control panel, installing programs, etc. I need to find a way around that or I'll go insane.
Needless to say I'm sticking with XP for now, but I can boot into Vista anytime I want to try the newest X10 demo though, which is the only reason I've upgraded. I'm sure Vista will turn into a great OS in time, but right now I'm kinda like: "
it took six years for THIS?!"