In Case You Missed the First Two Installments…
My first attempt to install Vista is documented in this entry, and my second attempt is here.
It Don't Bother Me Too Much
In a former life, back in the late 1990's, my friend Adam and I had a nice little consultancy in which we developed custom applications for small- to medium-sized businesses. In those days, we were busy enough to turn away potential clients, and as a two-man operation, we had to be jacks of all trades. Often, we'd have a client too small to have their own IT department, which meant that we got paid extra to help them with their IT woes. One common task was upgrading their operating systems to Windows 98 from Windows 95 or hoardy old Window 3.1, or maybe even DOS.
There's a point to all this exposition, and here it is: the difficulty that the Windows Vista installer had been giving me hadn't worried me thus far. I've actually had hairier installation experiences in the days before reliable plug-and-play, and as I've said before, the Wintel desktop at work wasn't my primary machine. At the end of my second install attempt, I was only a little annoyed.
As for the machine on which I'm installing Vista, it's not an old clunker. It's an IBM/Lenovo ThinkCentre desktop with a 3GHz Pentium 4 and half a gig of RAM that's six or seven months old. The likeliness of hardware incompatibility is rather low, and as a standard-issue large-vendor corporate computer that a white-collar worker-bee is likely to be assigned, it's likely to be in Vista's target machine set.
If Microsoft should be worried about anyone getting a bad impression about Vista, it should be people who don't eat, sleep and breathe computers like my colleagues and I do. These are the people who might not have an idea of what to do when confronted with the results of my first attempt to install Vista: that single line of garbage DOS text from my first install attempt.
And now, the final chapter in the Area Man Attempts to Install Windows Vista trilogy.
Shut Up and Reboot
Every IT worker knows this quick fix that handles about 90% of all computer problems: Shut up and reboot. This mantra has been repeated so often that it's been used as a gag on t-shirts and in at least one television show, The IT Crowd:
So that's what I did. I rebooted the machine, making sure that it booted from the DVD. I deleted the existing disk partition on the drive, created a new one, formatted it and selected it as the target for the Vista Install.
Lo and behold, it looked like it was working! Apparently, as it is with Windows software, one should always wait for the third version.
Here's what my Vista desktop currently looks like:
I've been working with it on and off for about two days now, and I'll post my impressions here as I continue working and doing some software development in it.