Made the jump to Vista
This past weekend I spent at a management session at the wonderful Crocodile Kruger Lodge. It really is an amazingly beautiful place with the best food I’ve ever had at a hotel, lodge, or guest house. I also had the chance to feed a zebra—as they literally walked right up to where I was standing. While not enjoying the outdoor activity, I did spend considerable time indoors discussing all kinds of things (many of which hurt my head) that will benefit the company I work for in amazing ways. I’m slowly beginning to understand concepts that don’t fit neatly into a try..catch..finally block.
So, during this time, I took the chance to reinstall my laptop and get Vista on it. The first thing I did was pop the DVD into the machine and looked for a way to run the Vista File and Settings Transfer Wizard (assuming it would run on XP and be better than XP’s). Easily enough, I found it on the splash screen. Interestingly enough, it’s now called Windows Easy Transfer, which I laughed at since we’ve moved from FAST to WET😉 (if you didn’t get the fact that I’m geeky from the try..catch in the first paragraph, hopefully, you are getting it now).
I then ran the XP Backup to back up my files (just in case WET had a problem) and dumped it all to an external drive. Next, I rebooted and went through the process of installing Vista (complete with formatting the hard drive). Once done, the machine rebooted, and I was greeted by the wonderful sight of Vista loading fine.
Now, one thing I didn’t take was the driver CD for my HP nx8220 laptop, so I was a little worried it wouldn’t work without it—but it worked perfectly, with the only items not having drivers being the sound card and the smart card reader. Those were easily sorted by using the "search online for drivers" feature (which never worked in XP, so +1 to Vista).
I then installed all the usual requirements (Office 2007, VS, etc.) and realized I needed to join the work domain to get my email. The problem was, I was using a wireless network to connect to a coworker’s laptop, which was sharing a GPRS internet connection (no 3G or ADSL where we were). So, I tried the idea of connecting via VPN, joining the machine to the domain (crazy, I know), and it worked! Now, to log in, and damn—"No logon servers available".
I logged back into the local account, connected the VPN again, and used the runas command-line tool with the /profile option to launch Notepad under my domain account (phew, that’s a long idea). But it meant the profile got copied down to the local machine even under a different account, which meant when I logged out, I could log back in.
And now to restore my profile using WET, and OMG—what a better tool! It copied my RSS feeds (Outlook, Windows, and IE ones), my Office preferred theme, my custom search providers for IE 7 (and kept Google as my default), and even the command-line colors I use! What it didn’t copy (which FAST used to) was all my internet and VPN connections, but it’s a simple job to set those up again.
All in all, it was an amazingly pleasant and easy-to-do install.