Song of The Day: Bugs - Artist: Pearl Jam

As I mentioned in my last post about installing Windows Vista, it wasn’t the best of times. Granted, there are articles warning of such problems, but after so many years, one would think that Microsoft could have been more prepared on the driver front given my system’s premium ready specs (i.e., a custom PC but newer, compatible components).

In summary here are the issues I encountered:

  • Both an older and newer DVD drive could not read the UDF install disc. When I put the disc into the drive, it displayed a README in the drive window. The README read:

    This disc contains a “UDF” file system and requires an operating system that supports the ISO-13346 “UDF” file system specification.

    If you receive this message you will likely have to download the disc image via another computer and DVD drive.

  • My upgrade aborted without any good indication of why. I had to perform a clean install. Lesson: be sure to backup your data like I did, fortunately, before performing the install.
  • My Creative’s Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum card stopped working. I had to revert back to my Abit IC7-G motherboard Realtek AC’97 Audio controller. I’m pretty sure this is becaues of Creative’s beta Vista driver. I hope an update is available soon.
  • I alluded to this already, but my Linksys LNE100TX didn’t work because there were no Vista drivers available. I bought a cheap ($20) Dynex PCI Adapter 10/100 Fast Ethernet card. I just couldn’t wait for the driver and Internet connectivity, but it still sucked to have to buy it :).

So my last post had the original list of components. Here is the list that Vista accepted:

LIST OF COMPONENTS (that eventually worked)

CPU - Intel Pentium 4 3GHz
Motherboard - Abit IC7-G
RAID Controller - HighPoint Tech SATA RocketRAID 1640 (Had to download Vista driver before starting; Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor caught it)
Disk - Two SATA Maxtor ~220G drives RAID striped
Ethernet - Dynex PCI Adapter 10/100 (Vista choked on the Linksys LNE100TX, no driver available)
RAM - 1Gig (2×512M) Corsair 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400
DVD - HP DVD-Writer DVD 100i (NOT before upgrade, but after the upgrade it did; remember README UDF problem?)
Video Card - ATI Radeon X850XT
Sound Card - Abit IC7-G motherboard Realtek AC’97 Audio controller (Creative drivers didn’t work for my Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum)
OS - Windows XP Home SP2 w/ all critical updates from Windows Update

So what was the total time spent upgrading? If you exclud the original trip to CompUSA to buy Vista, but include the Support call and extra runs to get peripherals, the upgrade was a total of 7 hours. This was from start to finish–everything mostly working! As far as peripherals, I spent $20 for the ethernet card. If you include the DVD drive, that I may return, then you’re talking $110. I guess that’s not too bad considering I was okay on the graphics card, CPU, drive, etc.

So in the end I’m really bitching more about the time spent upgrading due to the lack of supported drivers than anything else. My Vista performance score ended up being respectable with a 4.2 (i.e., anything between 4-5 is premium ready).

Now that I’ve been using Vista for a few days, I’ll say why I seem to be getting more and more addicted to Vista in my next post! :)

Hint: Windows Vista Media Center, Vista media apps, and the Xbox 360.

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