I did an upgrade to my Dell 9400 laptop (2.16GHz Duo, 2Gig RAM) from XP Pro to Vista Ultimate 32-bit ('cause I'm too chicken to try 64-bit yet).

The upgrade took a little over an hour. Painless.

The only problem I ran into immediately was with AVG 7.5 (it was on my XP). As soon as Vista let me log in I received several msgs about my AVG license key not being found, but the control center would not let me enter it. I opened Outlook 2007 (installed in XP) got a string of AVG errors and promptly blue screened! After restarting I figured I'd just reinstall AVG but when I tried to uninstall the uninstaller acted like I was trying to install and insisted I needed to enter my license key into AVG control center (nice eh?). I finally disabled AVG, rebooted with it disabled, and could then uninstall. I D/L'd the most current version and installed and all was happy.

All of my hardware seems to be recognized and working fine (YAY!!).

Initially it appeared that Vista was notably slower than XP, but I've noticed a significant speedup over time. Now performance seems pretty close to what I had with XP.

I spent most of the weekend just getting used to the UI (and playing with aero - pretty cool). It's definitely different but I'm pretty comfortable with it now (still an adventure to find anything new).

Gadgets are cool to look at but I'm almost ready to turn off the sidebar - I'm not convinced they are cool enough to justify screen/memory/processor usage (which of course I watch with a performance monitor gadget (duh))..

Someone mentioned windows not being transparent - My title bar and frames are. Looks nice and I think that is almost useful.

Had to install SQL 2005 SP2 CTP for SQL to be happy.

Waiting to see what is needed to make VS2005 happy (that should have been fixed long ago considering it is a flagship MS technology).

VFP 9 works fine. Watch out for My Documents referencing since My documents is replaced by Users in Vista (someone at MS should be beaten for that BONEHEAD idea!!). Vista has a link that tries to redirect My Documents calls, but it doesn't seem to work in all cases (I haven't nailed down specifics yet).

I like the enhanced security, although it seems to make IE7 behave differently than in XP (requires different windows for different zones - manages to leave a lot of Blank Pages when it jumps to a new window).

The adventure continues..

Bill Kuhn - MCSE
The Kuhn Group, Inc.
A Microsoft Certified Partner