I received a Vista laptop last week to use when I am at the customer site working on their systems. While we can connect via Citrix, management wants us to have a client PC as well. Nonetheless, I have access via both and to be honest, I prefer Citrix. I have not used it much because I can use Citrix for most everything I need on the client side.
Now a couple of weeks ago I received an e-mail telling me it was time to refresh my normal work laptop to a more modern and supportable model. I logged on to see what my options were and after some haggling (with the AI of the web site for heaven's sake), I ordered an HP nc6510b. Well, it came Friday evening after I left. Monday was a holiday and Tuesday I found it under my desk. It came with Vista and a 19 step instruction book on how to migrate from my old Win XP laptop to my new Vista laptop. Steps 1-18 went pretty smoothly (although Explorer crashed twice). Step 19 "Migrate files and settings to your new Vista PC was not a major problem but the way MS has gone from "My Documents" to simply "Documents" has some shortcuts that are set to a different permission level than I am. I mean, they were on my PC, transferred BY ME and yet I do not have permission to view them? Sheesh.
The last step was installing apps that the migration did not handle. For me that was our ticketing system (which in Vista requires a surgeon's had to install), Jabber (for talking to techs world wide), PuTTY (SSH client), and Citrix which has a problem with IE7, but not Firefox...guess which I prefer?
In Win XP we had a reg file that we would install to get all the funky configs set for PuTTY which allows us to securely and remotely log into our clients network, but that reg file did not work so I had to do all the settings by hand. It took a while, but I am finally online with all my needed apps. I still need to see if Palm Desktop works (I bet it doesn't) and all my plugins for Firefox.
The single hardest thing to get used to is MS Office 2007 Pro. It sucks. Not intuitive at all. It imports all your docs and makes them "compatible" with Office 2007. I have a lot of docs and editing them in the future is going to be hard.
After playing with Vista I can say it is pretty, but not nice. WinXP will suffice and if I could painlessly switch back, I would. But doing so means I have to "migrate" later and I do not want to do this again.
I am officially using Vista at work, but home is going to be Ubuntu Linux as a primary OS and Win XP when needed.
1 comment:
You will find that Vista offers nothing that XP can't do. If you need it, I have a list of all the directories that got changed or renamed. The most annoying feature is the User Access Control. During setup (migration) I'd turn it off or you'll have no end of trouble. We will not buy a computer at work that has Vista on it. Oh! and good luck with SP1 it is really bad if you have an AMD processor.
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