Since Windows 7 is coming out soon, I figured that it was perhaps a good time to upgrade from XP to Vista. It’s been around for a few years and most of the bugs must be worked out by now. Besides almost everyone I know is running Vista so it makes it hard to offer assistance when I don’t know what they’re talking about.

I followed all the Microsoft prep instructions and found that most of my installed programs would work fine and the ones that wouldn’t, I’d simply have to install the Vista version instead. And again, since Vista has been out for a while, I was able to find the updates without any problem.

After many, many hours of watching my hard disk churn away and a few reboots, the Vista login screen appeared. Upon browsing the folders I noticed that many document folders reverted to ‘Image’-type folder views. A quick search on the web showed me how to modify the registry to prevent that from re-occuring.

Then there’s the annoying User Account Control pop-up window that comes up everytime I’d open something. I understand the purpose of this extra protection but it’s really a pain to have the screen flash and that window pop up all the time. So once again, off to the internet I went searching for a way to keep UAC on but make it accept certain applications like Java automatically.

I found the perfect solution here. This webpage accurately details all the steps to follow to disable UAC for certain Vista applications. If you follow all the steps, you too can achieve success!!

So now I just have to get used to the new interface. The ability to type in the program name without having to mouse over endless menu trees is nice. It does take a bit more CPU cycles to run but for my purposes my dual core 3.0GHz pentium with 1.5GB of RAM is fine. But I think I’ll need to upgrade my HD soon cause all my media is taking up an ever increasing amount of space.

Ooh, and did I mention that running dual screens is amazing. Have a look below:

Cheers until next time!

written by Dino \\ tags: computers, PC, Vista