First impressions about Windows Vista RC1 (1/2)
Ok, since there are many products coming out (both commercial and free) here it comes what I hope it will be a serie of posts titled "Firts impressions about ...". The intention of these articles are to share my experiences, show others what to expect from the product, some tips and the typical initial "difficulties", and of course receive lots of feedback ;-) .
Some of other products I'm testing (or want to) are Windows Live products, MS Expression Web, SandCastle, MSBee, Office 2007, Virtual PC 2007 ...
Ok, so let's get started:
First of all I used a tool called Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor which will tell us if the hardware we are using is "vista ready" which devices will need driver updates and which installed programs may be incompatible.
Second we will need to back up all our files (I still haven't heard of any case of data loss installing or updating vista, but Murphy's laws are there ...)
It happens to me that I always forget something to back up (like my favorites or some folder I left in C: instead of my documents because I was in a hurry) So the best thing is to create a list of files you would like to back up (as Miguel did in his post). Also you can use a great tool that will remind you of the most important data to back up, like your profile and will search for all the folders that do not belong to the OS or the Program Files so you are more likely not to forget anything. This tool is called Windows Easy Transfer.
Now that all our data is safe we can proceed installing Windows Vista. There are two types, upgrade or clean install. My personal choice is to perform a clean install, so we will have a 100% fresh computer with no junk data anywhere. One of the nice things about the clean install is that if you have enough hard-drive it will save all your previous windows folder and program files into windows.old. In fact since all my data was in d: drive and the create windows.old folder I dind'nt need to restore my back up.
After Vista was installed I proceeded to install all my development tools. I didn't have any problems except for the following ones, so it might help you if you ran into them.
Reporting services (https://localhost/reports/Pages/Folder.aspx)
"Access to the path 'Global\CLR_RESERVED_MUTEX_NAME' is denied.
Home"
Solution: first try an IIS reset if that doesn't work. open the IE with "Run As Administrator"
Enterprise Library June 2005
"installation ended prematurely because of an error"
Solution: The only I could find was to extract in on another machine and then copy the extracted files into my computer :-(
VS Web Application Project "Fail installing"
Solution: Run As Administrator
VPC 2007
"The virtual Machine monitor driver required by virtual PC is missing. Please
reinstall virtual PC and try again"
Solution: Open a command prompt. execute: "net start vmm"
Since this is a rather large post I will leave my second impressions about using Vista for the next post.
So long,