Eric Cherng

There are a lot of blog posts and articles out there on the process of installing Vista on a brand new machine. However most people who actually have existing machines that want to move to Vista will likely upgrade rather than reinstall in order to save all their settings and files. In this post, I will go over my experience of upgrading an existing Windows XP machine to Vista RC2.

The machine I am upgrading is a Thinkpad T60 model 2623-D7U restored back to the original factory state. Yes this means all the junk normally installed on a new PC is all there. Not only that, but I installed a couple of other applications just to see how Vista handles software conflicts. My software includes:

• Firefox 1.5.0.8
• Office 2007 Beta 2 Technical Refresh
• Autohotkey
• foobar2000
• Activesync
• Internet Explorer 7

with some of the existing original factory software:

• Google Desktop
• Symantec Client Security
• Sonic DVD Burning
• Thinkvantage Stuff
• Diskeeper Lite
• Verizon Broadband
• Java 1.4
• Netwaiting
• PC-Doctor 5
• Adobe Reader 7

The first thing I did was pop in my RC2 DVD into the drive. Autorun started up immediately and loaded up the setup dialog.

If you click the "Check compatibility online" link, it just opens up your browser to this Microsoft site. Nothing special so just click "Install Now".

After a few seconds of waiting, I get this dialog to ask if I want to get the latest updates.

Once I confirmed the updates, I get the next dialog telling me setup is searching for updates.

Of course you have to enter in a key installing anything nowadays.

Not to mention agreeing to the EULA.

After 5 steps, I'm finally greeted with the meat of the upgrade: easy upgrade or advanced upgrade.

Being lazy, I went ahead and let the easy upgrade go. Before upgrading, Vista has to scan for any incompatabilities.

Which it does indeed find. The first time, setup told me that the Symantec security client installed is not compatible and that I had to uninstall it before proceeding. After doing that, I had to go through all the previous steps once again to come back to this screen. This time, it provided warnings about incompatibilities, but didn't quit setup.

Finally, I arrive at the copy file stage.

During this phase, setup will reboot a few times. Up to now, setup has been running on your existing Windows XP operating system. However, once your computer reboots, your computer will now boot into Windows PE setup mode.

Everything after this setup is exactly the same as the fresh installation as I blogged about here.

So reactions to my Vista upgrade.

First off, the time it takes to upgrade your operating system is no shorter than a fresh install. In fact I would say it took longer. I have yet to see a 20 minute installation that Vista marketing keeps saying. The only 20 minute setup of an OS that I have seen recently is for Ubuntu.

The setup program for upgrading to Vista versus installing a new Vista OS is nearly identical. The only difference is you don't have a formatting hard drive step. On the other hand, now you have to deal with any incompatabilities that setup might have detected.

Looking at my hard drive after the upgrade, some of the significant folders are gone. For example the notorious Documents and Settings folder is gone from the root. Only a symlink exists there. Instead this folder is now in the new Users folder.

After the upgrade, all of my files and settings were kept intact. Even all the junk applications were still around. The common drivers still worked in Vista except the Sonic Solutions DVD recording driver and the Thinkpad Trackpoint drivers. I don't have a Verizon Broadband account so I wasn't able to test that out. Also if you try to run any of the Thinkvantage software (security, backup, ...) Vista will tell you they are not compatible. Though the fingerprint scan tutorial worked, the fingerprint login was gone.

So now that I've tried the upgrade process with Vista, I still believe a clean install is the way to go for the majority of installations. If you really want to keep your settings around, go for the upgrade. However just remember that the UI for Vista is so different, it won't matter what settings you have in Windows XP. If you are doing an upgrade just because you are too lazy to back up your computer, you are putting a lot of faith that the upgrade won't end in disaster. And finally if you are doing an upgrade because you think your hardware will work better as opposed to a clean install, I can definitely say that is not the case. If the drivers you had for Windows XP works in Vista, you can always install a fresh copy of Vista and install those XP drivers as well. The only advantage of upgrading for this scenario is you don't have to go download the drivers again since they are already installed. 

Therefore, my recommendation is that a clean install of Vista is better than upgrades for the majority of cases. A clean install will not only get rid of all the "junk" on your computer, but it will make sure your new operating system will be performing at its peak without old applications bogging it down.

Whenever an application asks you to save a file somewhere, you get a window that looks something like this in Vista:

Notice the Favorite Links on the left hand side. This is similar to the Places Bar in the save dialog in Windows 2000/XP:

In Windows 2000/XP, it was difficult to customize this list of shortcuts. You would have to hack some registry settings or do it programmatically. Luckily in Vista, they made it much easier to customize this list.

All you have to do is add a shortcut to the C:\Users\[username]\Links folder!

I download files frequently, so i usually put them in a Downloads folder. So to make it easier to save files, I added a shortcut to the Downloads folder. Now whenever I need to save a downloaded file, I can click on my new shortcut!

This also customizes the Favorite Links in Windows Explorer as well. So when you browse for files on your computer, the shortcut will also appear there!

Games are a big part of the Vertigo culture. Nearly all our developers play some kind of game every once in a while. Just taking a look at some of our gaming posts we've done probably shows this. ;)

With Vista, games are getting high priority as well with a top level Start Menu shortcut. Here's a peak at the Games Start Menu item in Vista RC1.

Once you open the Games folder, you see all the games on your system. Looks like Windows comes with some new games now.

If you hit the Tools button, all the important Game-related functions and settings are located here. Very useful.

Finally you can customize the Game folder by clicking on the Options button, which brings up this dialog.

I'm assuming future games with the Games for Windows logo will automatically add game shortcuts directly in the Games folder.

What's new with these games?

• Chess takes 15 seconds to load on my Thinkpad T60. While it takes forever to load, it looks very pretty with real time reflections of the pieces on the board and free rotation.
• Minesweeper has some really nice animations now. Make sure you make the window larger if you have a high resolution monitor. Otherwise you won't be able to see all the graphical details.
• Solitaire has updated cards and nice transition animations (flipping cards, moving cards).

Also, you might notice your game icons shuffling around the Game folder once you start playing games. They are moving around because by default the icons are sorted by Last played, so as you play the games, the icons are resorting themselves.

Update 9/19/2006 1:03 pm

Jeff sent me a screenshot of a new game he installed on his Vista machine. Looks like I was right in thinking games would install a shortcut in the Games folder. Although the WEI score requirement looks fishy.. only a 1.0?

The new Start Menu in Vista features a power button next to the Search bar. What do you think will happen when you click the power button? Since it's the power button, you would expect it to shut down the computer right? Well too bad that's not the default behavior. Instead, by default the power button is configured to go on standby when you click the power button. Um.. is it just me or does that just not make sense?

I realize Microsoft's goal is to make computing more like a home appliance: shutdown really means standby so you can start up your computer immediately (just like you startup your TV immediately). Personally I use my hardware buttons to make my computer go into Standby, and then use the Start Menu's power button to shut down Windows. So as you can probably guess, I hate how the power button doesn't shutdown my computer anymore. Plus also old habits die hard.

So if you want to change this, you'll have to do the following.

First you'll need to go to the Power Options. This is easier said than done. If you are using the categorized Control Panel, you can get to it by going:

Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Change battery settings

and no, Change what the power buttons do does not work. That changes what happens with your physical power buttons, not the Start menu power button.

If you have the Classic View control panel, go this path:

Control Panel > Power Options

Next follow this path, which is the same for both Control Panel styles:

Change plan settings under Balanced > Change advanced power settings > expand Power buttons and lid > expand Start menu power button

and from here you can finally change this configuration. Yes, that is a total of 7 clicks just to change the power button configuration! If you didn't follow those steps, take a look at this series of screenshots:

Is it just me or did Microsoft make this REALLY complex to change? I had to dig around for 5 minutes before I finally found this!

And to make matters worse, remember earlier we selected the Balance power plan? Well these settings are per plan. That means if you change your plan, the Power button gets reset to Standby again! You'll have to individually configure each Power plan to make the power button be the same for all plans. Why can't we have a "Override all power plan" option? What a pain!

One last thing to notice, check out the first Start menu, and then this Start menu:

See anything different? The new Start menu now shows the power button as red instead of the original yellowish color. This is the visual cue that the power button now means Shutdown (red) instead of Standby (yellow). Personally I would prefer if the tooltip would just immediately popped up when the mouse hovers over the button and simplify the message to "Shutdown" instead of "Closes all open programs, shuts down Windows, and then turns off your computer" or "Standby" instead of "Keeps your session in memory and puts the computer in a low-power state so that you can quickly resume working." Geez what a mouthfull!

I just found an interesting bug in Firefox v1.5.0.6 when running in Vista RC1.

If you delete all your bookmarks in your Bookmark Toolbar, the display/browser area of Firefox goes crazy and twitches up and down. Only when you add something back into the Bookmark Toolbar does it stop twitching. Check out this animated gif of this behavior:

I know it's hard to see, but the twitching motion just keeps going and is very fast. The twitching happens to all Firefox windows with the Bookmark toolbar visible. I don't think anything bad happens, it just gets annoying after the first 5 seconds of finding it funny.

The 2 ways I found to fix this is to:

1. Add something back into your Bookmarks Toolbar .. or ...
2. Remove the Bookmarks Toolbar.

I guess it's bugs like these why the Mozilla team has accepted Microsoft's invitation to help make sure Firefox works on Vista. Other than this weird twitching, I haven't noticed any other problems running Firefox on Vista.

Another in my series of Vista posts. Ever found it annoying when you rename a file in Windows Explorer the default selection is the entire file: filename and extension? Like this:

I just found out Vista took a page from the GNOME book and finally changed this behavior. Vista now does the same thing as GNOME: selects the file name without the file extension!

Of course the same thing happens when you create a new file as well.

Great stuff!

Here's what a window looks like in Vista when it's Not Responding:

Here's what the window looks like when it is running properly:

Pretty neat effect indicating a broken window, unlike XP's half drawn window. What would be even better, is if it actually drew a crack as if it really IS a broken window!

I noticed with the crashing version of the window is there actually is a menu and window title associated with the window. Why does Vista hide this leaving just empty space in the normal running Explorer?

Being the nerd that I am, instead of spending Labor Day weekend grilling hot dogs, I spent my weekend installing Vista RC1 on my laptop (IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad T60 2623-D7U).

Similar to Scott's experience, my installation went smooth as well. Aero worked out of the box. I was able to get a WEI score of 4.0 (sorry Scott, but my laptop pwned yours ). I also couldn't get audio to work out of the box.

And for those who don't have a chance to try out the new build yet, here's a visual walkthrough of the installation on my laptop.

Choose your language:

Let's do it!

Usual enter your key. Unlike XP, this is the 3rd dialog in Vista!

Do you agree?

Custom installation!

Select your parition.

Installing...

Reboot... please wait.

More installing...

Your name and picture.

What is the name of your computer?

Secure computing, Microsoft's way!

Select your time zone and your time

You're welcome!

More waiting and more installing...

Yay! Finally at the login screen!

The anticipation builds...

Woohoo! Done!

After installing Windows XP for the past 5 years, the Vista setup visually seems light years ahead. Contrary to XP's NT-like setup process (DOS phase, copy files, then Windows phase), Vista has a complete GUI setup experience. Unfortunately the much touted image setup process didn't improve much on the time it takes to install. It took me 40 minutes from the first picture I took above up to when I finally was able to use my computer. A little shorter than XP's installation time, but not by much.

One thing I noticed with Vista's setup that I found very annoying is the lack of any status indicator. Everything is abstracted with generic messages like "Installing features" or "Please wait a moment while Windows prepares to start for the first time..." with the dots going on and on. Instead of endless dots (or endless rotations of an animated circle), I would much prefer to see which files are being copied or at least a progress bar to show how much is left of the install. How about a time estimate like XP's setup?

While I understand Microsoft is trying to make everything more user friendly, I doubt most home users would be performing Windows setup anyways. I know from personal experience, most friends/family call me up if they have any trouble with their computer and I usually end up reinstalling Windows for them if needed. Therefore, why make setup so abstract like this? Give us some status! At least it gives us something to look at while we sit around for 40 minutes. I sure hope RTM will not be this abstract.

Well that's it for setup. Hope you enjoyed this visual walkthrough!

I'm sure we're all familiar with what the Windows XP installation process is like by now... but how well do you know the Vista installation process? I wrote up a quick article combining all the screenshots I took while installing Vista Beta 1 on a VPC image.

You can find the article here.