Eyes Are Falling Out

I haven't been on the blog of late because I've been working in the computer room on a couple new computers. Lo and behold I've had 2 Vista computers in the office to play with. Of course one of the computers is my own new HP Pavilion Media Center with 2 gigs of RAM, a 400 gig hard drive and a AMD 5000+ processor. The other computer is an Acer system with a 3800+ AMD, 250 gig HD and 1 gig of RAM. I've been working on the systems for so long my poor eyes are having a bit of trouble focusing of late.

My first impressions are that Vista is different but nothing earth shattering.

Let me tell you though, I don't think I'd be running Vista with only the minimum of 512 megs of RAM. The computers I'm working on are brand new and have only had Vista Home Premium installed on them so I haven't tried an upgrade just yet so I'm not sure what can of worms the upgrade would bring into it.

For my own system I had the computer up and running in a few short hours with most of what I had on my previous computer (ie Email, Favourites, etc). It did take me a couple hours to figure out how to network them all together so I could go back and forth and transfer favourite programs, pics, tunes, etc. Looking back at it now it was a relatively easy task. The major stumbling block was the firewalls (ie ZoneAlarm Pro and Norton Internet Security not playing nice). But after I got them sorted out, it seems to be working quite fine.

On my own system I have only found one program that is causing a bit of problem. That is the EPrompter Email notifier program that I use. It takes it's updates from the Windows Help system and Vista does not use this Help system at all. So of course my program won't update so I can't receive notification of my Windows Live account. This is not a great problem as I don't really get very much email through this account anyhow. I haven't tried switching over from the supplied Norton Internet Security to my preferred ZoneAlarm Pro as of yet either. I've read that there 'may' be a problem with ZoneAlarm and Vista. I don't foresee this as a large problem as I'm sure ZoneAlarm will have a fix out quickly. I do get 60 days to play with the Norton Internet Security before it dies. As well I haven't installed my preferred NOD32 antivirus either. I'll tackle that in a couple days and see what transpires. Once again I'm sure that if NOD32 does have a problem it will get fixed quickly. As a side note on the other computer I did install the free AVG antivirus and it works quite fine.

On the second machine I did run into some problems with the printer however. The fellow had bought a brand new HP Photosmart C3180 All In One printer just recently. There were no drivers available for this printer for Vista so I had to go to the HP website to get some. Even at the website HP only had basis drivers available so the full function of the 'All In One' will not be able to be used until the drivers are updated. But for now the printer does print as it should.

Overall I would have to say that the largest difference I've found between XP and Vista is the file system and where each operating system stores their defaults. Another thing with Vista is that the program pops up dialogue boxes questioning if you are actually doing a certain task or not. If you are, you click on 'allow' and away you go. In one way it seems to be a little more security conscious that XP was.

I'll play with the system a bit longer to see what other problems may occur. So far so good though.