So, I had a chance to upgrade a machine from Windows XP Media Center to Windows Vista Home Premium.  The machine is a Dell XPS 710 with a QX6700 (Quad Core) processor, NVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2 (dual GPU), and a terabyte RAID disk subsystem.  Overall, it's a pretty fast machine needed to drive lots of Photoshopping (and games) on a Dell 30" monitor running at 2560x1600 resolution.

The Dell express upgrade came with two DVDs.  One DVD to prepare your machine for the upgrade by updating programs, removing some other programs, and testing out programs you had installed yourself via the standard upgrade adviser.  Running this only had one little hitch.  It got in to a loop with the BIOS update.  Eventually, I realized this and went and downloaded the BIOS update myself.  This then allowed it to continue. 

The only program flagged as being incompatible was a component of Norton Internet Security Suite.  That component was the Internet Security part, not the AV or other parts.  I'm guessing that it might interfere with Windows Defender.  During the check, though, it offered to update it to resolve the issues.  Like many of the updaters, this opened the developers website, in this case Symantec's.  This site detected that there was an update available.  The link, however, went off to purchase NIS 2007 to upgrade the installed version of NIS 2006.  I decided to just uninstall NIS rather than pay money again for the application.  This actually greatly annoyed me, but we weren't using it anyway yet.

The installation itself went smoothly, even if it did say it may take "several hours to complete" and let me tell you, the progress bar was really long on the 30" monitor.  It did take over an hour to complete, though.  However, when it did all of it's stuff and booted up for the first time, I was impressed that everything pretty much looked the same.  All of the desktop items were in the same place, all of the applications looked right and worked.  In addition to this, though, most of the nifty new features were enabled like the Windows Sidebar and Aero. 

After this, the Dell upgrade assistant application continued by grabbing some new drivers and reinstalling applications that had to be removed.  This is where the first problem came in to play.  The installers all started running at once.  The Soundblaster X-Fi installer hung a few times and then ran across many errors during installation -- besides taking half an hour to start having errors so it would finish. 

After all of this installation mess, only a couple of problems remained. The InstallShield update manager wants to run an startup no matter what I do to it's settings.  This brings up an error dialog box on each boot.  The other problem was that the Roxio Sonic DLA driver was blocked on each boot.  I'm not sure why it was reinstalled after Vista was installed since it's not compatible, but I had to remove the Roxio Drag-to-Disk item in the Control Panel before this error dialog went away.

I still can't get the InstallShield dialog to go away.  I think it must come up even when it's piece is loaded in to the Control Panel.  I know when I launch it from the Control Panel, the dialog comes up.

After running it for a while, I've found that it's pretty much still Windows, as it should be.  The performance on this machine is pretty good.  All components ranks at 5.8 or 5.9, with the notable exception of the memory that ranks at 4.7.  However, I retested these while the system had some applications running and it told me it couldn't complete.  Since it couldn't complete, it decided to disable Aero even though it was running and would continue to run fine.  In order to enable Aero, I had to run the tool again with the system cleanly booted and relatively idle.

I think my most used new feature of Vista has been the search on the Start Menu.  I hit the Windows key, then type part of the program name, see it at the top of the results, and hit enter to launch it.  That's a real time saver, in my opinion. 

All of the new program switching and live preview things are neat.  I don't know that they actually add any productivity value, though.  All of the glass effects are also neat, of course.  There's not really a "wow" effect there for me, though.  In fact, not much, to me, seems to be a wow feature or a true productivity boost.  Perhaps ReadyBoost is savings a second or two here or there. 

One thing that surprised me was that there seems to now be a bunch of missing items in Windows Media Center.  All of the online media, such as video clips and radio streams, are gone or missing or disabled or something.  I don't see any way to add radio streams, either.  There aren't any presets nor can I find any settings.  If it right-click, I get the general settings for all of Media Center, which doesn't including anything for online content or radio. I'm actually a bit confused.  This doesn't appear to be shared, either.  Most people are saying that this content went live on January 17 of this year. UPDATE:  I forced a download in the settings by going to "Tasks->Settings->General->Automatic Download Options->Download Now" and then waiting.  Apparently the automatic part of the automatic download options I had turned on wasn't.

Was it worth the $12 in shipping and handling?  Absolutely.  Would it have been worth more than that?  Probably not.  I'd recommend either taking advantage of the free upgrades if you can or waiting for it to be included in your next PC purchase.

Posted by Shane on March 5, 2007 8:10 AM | Permalink