The Vista experience

After having crashed my P4P800E motherboard (a piece of crap), i decided to buy a new one (motherboard).

You see, building my own PC, i though that would be a piece of cake… Not quite.

First the power-supply went down. I though : “that’s a matter of 70 bucks”.

Then i realized the mobo was out of well. There came the hassles. I could not find the same mobo. Too old i was told.

Had to buy a new one. Guess what. They come with these new SATA connectors, and only one IDE connector for the CDROMs and diskette (yes, still here…).

My Windows XP system was on one of my IDE drives… Damned. Had to reinstall Windows…

So i boot up windows on the IDE, but hey, it does not recognize the new SATA drive. Yeah, SATA was kind of new 5 years ago when XP came up… To be more precise, strangely enough, it did recognize the 300GB drive as a 127 GB drive (i don’t like these numbers, 127… Don’t know why .

Fair enough i said, let’s format it. Windows then installs itself, reboot to complete the install, and then does not boot at all…

Probably a SATA issue again… After a lost day, i decided to go to my local computer store where i am being told that i’d better buy a new license of XP, or even better, Vista.

At this point, i was kinda mad at the idea to have to reinstall 50+ software installs…

So i fork 450 CHF to buy the crap.

I boot the Vista CD up, and the SATA drive is not recognized. Kind of funny to be asked where you want to install Vista with no drive available…

Back to the computer store again, where apparently, i don’t really know exactly, they tweaked the bios SATA configuration and installed Vista for me (they took a full day to do it, for 100 bucks…).

A couple of days later, there comes Vista…

I was very nervous at the idea of having to reconnect my Livebox, external drives, 2 printers, 5.1 system, 5 years old video camera, 5 years old fire-wire Fuji S2 Pro, the Panasonic DMC-FX 30 point and shoot, the G25 wheel, the joystick and old epson scanner but it went quite smooth overall, and i am quite pleased with the result.

I managed to have a blue screen though, after having connected 2 external drives transferring data to the SATAs while downloading from the web and switching users at the same time.

Would i go as far as recommend it ?. Yes. The linux developer that i am must acknowledge that as a user, it works quite well…

Seb.

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