Removed Vista
Had to remove Vista from my laptop today. I’ve have had the CTP release on a machine since December. With the February release I thought I would try it on my laptop as I wasn’t getting to use it on the test machine as much as I wanted. On the test machine I have had no problems with it, I've had good performance out of it and it’s been pretty stable but that machine was of a decent spec. On the laptop it was running like a dog but this is only a 1.7mhz centrino with 512mb ram, and the beta of office 12 on there probably didn’t help much either. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t get decent drivers for the laptop. Most of the major players seem to have vista drivers appearing on the websites, people like ATI and Creative but the Sony Vaio website doesn’t have any support yet. Graphics were sluggish without a decent driver, I couldn’t get any sound and there was no support for the GPRS modem card I had which is my lifeline while I’m out and about.
I will leave it on the test machine for now and just have to try and use it more. I will probably go for it on my games pc when it hits release candidate as the games I have tested on it so far have worked well.
One good thing about putting it on the laptop was I got to see the wireless support and how it was different from XP. Because I upgraded the laptop it was already on the domain and it wouldn’t let me log on over wireless as the wireless network configurations hadn’t come across. It was giving me an error along the lines of no login servers available. Had to login local and set up a wireless connection and make it available for all users on the computer before it would let me login.
To get it back to how it was before I tried a new product called Arconis True Image. It lets u take an image of a machine without having to shut it down and then you can create restore media to then restore that image. I tried to create restore media on a USB memory stick but I couldn’t get my laptop to boot from USB so had to create a CD instead. I had backed up the image to another partition on my laptop so just booted off the CD and selected the image and I think it took around 30 mins to restore the 30GB partition back to how it was pre Vista. http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/