October 2006
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I am The Cyberwolfe and these are my ramblings. All original content is protected under a Creative Commons license - always ask first.
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Did I kill it?

Feeling adventurous today, so I am going to try and dual-boot my windows disk to Vista. I’ll be writing this entry as the process goes forward, so don’t mind my changes of time tense. This is a long post (obviously) with pictures, thanks to having a roomie with more gadgetry than I. I’ll tuck the rest of this behind the linky…and my apologies for the lousy pictures, strictly operator error.

Vista has a new bootloader that I am hoping will repair the whole “must boot from old IDE drive C” problem I have never gotten around to fixing, hence the dual-boot instead of new install on a clean disk. This means doing some drive-space higgledy-piggeldy first to create space. Yay for Partition Magic!

Okay, the drives have been partitioned, time to boot this thing and see what happens. Hey, check this out – real colors in a windows installer!

IMG 2012

EULA, EULA, EULAs everywhere. We knew that was coming, and I won’t bore you with a picture of it. After that is the key request.

IMG 2014

There are a couple of options for installation, one for a new install and the other is for an upgrade. Upgrade has been disabled – I’m not sure if that is because it can’t find a previous bootloader, or because this is a Beta. Probably the former.

Looks like the dev team took a page from a couple of the Linux installers and gave this one some pretty highlights. It even has a graphical disk manager instead of XP’s text version. Pretty limited though – it doesn’t allow for re-sizing or moving of partitions, just creation and deletion like in XP. I’ve also read that the Vista bootloader takes over the hard drive making it impossible to boot to previous non-windows installations. Gee- color me surprised.

IMG 2016

Now that we have determined the type of install and where to put it, it’s time to go make some coffee. When the download-decompress-install bit is done, it reboots, comes back to this screen, then reboots again after completing the installation.

IMG 2017

Ahh, now we are getting somewhere. Namely, the user name and password screen.

IMG 2019

After that comes the computer name screen, with a selection of background wallpapers to choose from. Nice to not get stuck with something like “Bliss” on every install.

The next screen is for Windows protection settings. I’m using custom settings here, since I won’t be needing the built-in firewall.

Aww, how polite of them.

IMG 2020

Now it does a little hardware detection to see how much bling it can give me. I get to watch a little slide show about the new features while it digs around. This took almost 3 minutes.

IMG 2021

Oooh, pretty greeting page. The hourglass is gone, now replaced by a little spinning thing that chases it’s tail. I’ve seen that before somewhere…

IMG 2022

And here we have the first desktop! Okay, time to get a screenshotter in this thing so I can get some better pics. Well, that would be easy, except that Vista can’t figure out how to make a simple network card work. There are apparently no basic drivers at all in this stupid thing. It can’t even figure out what the card IS. Now that is just asinine – it took the XP 3Com drivers, but they couldn’t include a copy on the frigging install DVD? Oi.

Welcome screen

So anyway, now that I have that sorted out, you will get a welcome screen when you first boot into Vista. Uncheck the box in the corner to get rid of it on next boot, but take a minute to wander through here. They have moved several things, and this gives you an idea of where you may locate things in the future.

And now for a screenshot of the finished install. Now you can see the “Graphite” theme I’m using, the new Start menu, and a couple of the Gadgets that come stock with the Beta. Woo-hoo, will the fun never cease?

general screen

There ya have it, folks – a clean install of Windows Vista RC1. Installation is no worse than usual, and actually went quicker than the last XP install I did went. Of course, this didn’t require 34 some-odd security patches… Anywho, I’ll beat on this for a few days and let you know what I think.

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