Here I am a few months later, and my thoughts have changed little. A few days ago I went over to the local CompUSA store to pick up a shiny new retail copy of Windows Vista Home Premium for a rather ridiculous price. So after the initial shock factor of having spent that much on a product I wasn’t too sure about, but for the most part forced to buy, I prepared my powerhouse desktop computer for installation. I chose to do a fresh install rather than upgrade my existing Windows XP installation. I highly recommend this approach since you are almost guaranteed heartache and possible data loss if something goes awry, so opt to backup your critical files and start fresh to avoid potential disaster. If you have the option to purchase a new computer with Vista already installed, you will be in even better shape to make the transition as smooth as possible. After formatting the installation drive and booting off the Vista DVD, I noticed installation seemed more streamlined and required less information from me than XP did in the past. Setup asked for the product key and location where to install and it did its thing for about 30 minutes. After several unattended reboots, I was finally presented the familiar Windows desktop and start menu. I’m emphasizing familiarity here because not much has changed since XP. The layout of the start menu and control panel has been only slightly improved in my opinion. The highly touted Aero Glass interface was pleasing to the eyes, but after a while the window dressing loses its appeal, and you tend to look past the bells and whistles.

As I had expected, I was immediately faced with several of the same challenges that I encountered with the test versions. Right away, Windows told me that several drivers for key hardware components, including my sound and video cards, were missing. A trek over to the manufacturer’s website only made the potential misery a reality. I was unable to find drivers for my sound card and was told they would be released sometime in quarter one of 2007, which forced me to revert back to a different brand’s card I had lying around. I was getting frustrated at this point, as more and more devices I had used for years on XP were suddenly rendered useless. I could go on and on about random issues and software incompatibilities I’ve had so far, but my point should be obvious. I would personally recommend that Vista not be installed until at least six months from now, and at that time, one should re-evaluate the possibility of purchasing a new computer that has Vista already installed. My past article titled “Are you ready for Vista” should be definitely used as a guideline for hardware requirements because Vista certainly requires a very powerful computer with plenty of system memory if you plan to be able to somewhat enjoy it.

Although I must admit, after a couple weeks of figuring out solutions to some of the problems, Vista is actually starting to grow on me and I’m finding it rather stable and responsive. This is largely due to the fact that I’m running it on a very high-end computer, but my thoughts are mixed and it will be some time before I can give my final opinion.