Top 5 things to do after installing Vista

Turn off User Account Control from User Accounts
Adjust the way the Security Center prompts you - Set it to not prompt you at all, ever.

Step 6 for me was “That’s enough of this crap!” which occurred approximately 3 days later, and a quick diskpart and format and all the Vista nastiness was gone. (Vista makes it hard to remove itself without the use of tools most don’t use.

Perhaps after the 2nd service pack it will be ok, but I have been working on machines from Dell, equipped with Vista, for the past 3 weeks, and after all the updates to current are done, the STOP ERRORs and colored-screens- of- death are gone, but it is still a pig. Side by side comparisons on 2 otherwise identical Dells shows an almost 2:1 difference in speed for most tasks. (Boot time is almost 3 times slower.)

With Vista the annoyances don’t stop.

I think that most seasoned people will not use Vista unless forced. Newer users, with less to mentally compare, will not complain as much, and will be the adopters that MS will court.

As many times as I read articles about slow adoption of EVERY MS OS, I know, having lived through all of them as a teacher, repairman, and user, that Vista is being resisted much more than anything since DOS 4.0.

I can’t say I agree. I am running Vista on 2 Dell Notebooks and have had ZERO issues. There is one of my systems however, that I have Vista installed and running on where I do run into some small issues, none of which make me want to go back to the clunky, slowness which is XP.

After having installed Vista on two computers (on top of the previous XP) and going through all the steps outlined to get a cleaner, smoother, “faster” PC. I am recommending to keep XP on a couple of others I’ve been maintaining. It just doesn’t make sense after going through the “growing pains” of XP to go through it all over again with Vista … and end up with inferior results when the current totally upgraded XP installations satisfy all the needs of the customer.

As for my personal machines, I am leaving XP … but only ‘cuz some programs I use don’t play nice with Wine … and use Ubuntu as my primary OS on both base station and laptop. Without exception … aside from the previous statement … I have found Ubuntu to be much more satisfactory to pretty much every situation I’ve had to deal with. And for gamers, Wine currently has proven to be pretty much okay for things many games and more every day as more and more gamers are tweaking their Linux boxes.

Sooo … I guess my vote would be for XP over Vista and Linux over both of the MS OSes …

I have had vista on my new desktop machine for a number of months now and felt it much more stable and crash resistant than XP.
Many of the issues arise from the built in rubbish, such as UAC which is a serious no no for advanced users, just get rid of it.

Another good thing to do with vista, if you have a SATA Hdd is go to device manager (right click Computer ->Properties -> Hardware -> Device Manager)
Find your Hdd and right click on it -> Properties

Go to Policies, check optimise for performance and the two tick boxes below.

This increases the speed of the hdd drastically but I wouldn’t reccomend it for laptops / external drives (incase they get switched off while still in use).

I noticed a major speed increase, especially with defragging (perfeckdisk).

Paul

I’m not sure why so many people say XP crashed a lot? Being an admin since the Windows 3.1.1 days…XP is solid. OSes only crash when (1) when users install crap software (2) it is Vista

Bottom line: Vista has far too many problems to be an easy sell to management. For those working at home this really doesn’t apply to you but for the rest of us who actually have to support more than one machine it is a major issue. Think about, even if a small percentage of workstations have issues these are still helpdesk calls we MUST deal with and we all know when rebuilding boxes how long this takes and all of the end-user hand holding we must do for the week following…

In my opinion and from my years of experience, this is another Windows Millennium if you ask me. Tons of promise but, in the end, a flop.

There’s nothing wrong with XP at all. I rarely receive calls from end-users about their Operating System having issues. It’s almost ALWAYS application level stuff OR simple user training that resolves any issues.

For us, there is clearly NO BENEFIT to upgrading all of our hardware and buying licenses just to have a pretty OS…what’s the business case–zero!

Just food for thought..

Alternative to #1 — press the Windows key and Pause/Break at the same time.

Comment about #3 — I believe Windows Vista automatically does a weekly defrag. The reason I say this is because my Windows Vista computer already has a schedule for every Wednesday at 1AM.

You dont have to activate Windows Vista to get updates, I know that for a fact. I think I would do also is download all the drivers for your hardware and save them to a extra drive, or a removable flash drive. I make sure before installing a new OS that i have everything in order, it sucks when you don’t have the Network driver disk and you need to download the drivers for it. Once everything is installed I recommend you do the disk cleanup and defrag, works wonders!

Good luck!

A few other useful things to do. Go into Folder Options and untick “Hide extensions for known file types”. Also go to View and enable viewing of the Status Bar. Right-click on Desktop->Personalize, then click Change Desktop Icons on the left pane to add Computer, Network, etc.

Now that you have Vista exactly the way you want it, make a clonezilla CD and then make an image of your disk. If something goes wrong you can just restore your disk from the image.