OK - finally bit the bullet. After hearing all kinds of horror stories, I avoided Vista like the plague. Tonight, that all changed.

Bought a new desktop with an AMD-64x2 processor. Fired it up and verified that Vista Home Pro worked before violating the warranty, ripping out the modem, adding 3G of RAM, and erasing the hard drive to load Vista-64 Enterprise. (yeah, made the recover CDs, just in case.) Anyway, I had the CD with XP-64 handy, just in case...

Installation - from boot to completion was about 30 minutes. I was surprised - almost pleasantly, considering my last load of XP took longer. I'm sure the x64 system helped.

Having never seen Vista (other than ads/demos), it took about 30 minutes to poke around before I could have it looking something like what I'd be comfortable with - no background image, and "normal" desktop icons. Another 15 minutes and I was joined to the domain and - wait?! What kind of login page is this?? Press Ctl-Alt-Del was there, but no domain field. I guess I should be used to USER@DOMAIN logins by now, but still was surprised.

Login script failed - I need to update the OS detection logic, mostly for x64. My Memory UDF just doesn't work on X64 systems, since the registry data is on 64b boundaries instead of 32b. It's one of the reasons I bought the 64b box, so my work is piling up already.

I won't start loading software until I get the login script issue resolved, and load my usual Kix and R/K network utilities. I figure that by the weekend I should have MS-Office installed, and hopefully some of the multimedia tools as well. Then the real fun of testing non-MS apps will begin.

So far, I'm not appalled, but I'm sure the hardware helps. I'll be loading Vista 32b on my old P-4 3GHz system next month. Have an updated video adapter already for that system, and it's got 2G ram, so it should be a good candidate. We'll see.

As for Server 2K8 - well.. I can't imagine digging through all this crap to change settings while people are screaming that some application is down. Thank goodness the command prompt is still here! ;\)

Glenn
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Actually I am a Rocket Scientist! \:D