The Vista Challenge

Everyone poo poos Vista. No one likes change. No one wanted to move from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. Heck, what am I saying, no one want to leave DOS3.3 for Windows 3.0.

Sure there are some buggy OSs (ME anyone?) but actually they all work amazingly well. Look, if you want your 10 year old dot matrix printer to continue to work, you may need to run Windows 95, that's just the way it goes.

So I've shunned the world and am loading Vista on my new machine. Frankly I'd have liked to run the 64 bit version, but apparently drivers just aren't around for it. I looked up my hardware and it seems there are drivers for the majority of it. I think I'll be ok from that standpoint.

Lastnight I started the install. Went pretty well. I got all the hardware installed the day before, last night I just prettied up the cabling. I went into the BIOS and tweeked a couple of things, put in the Vista disk and...BSOD. Hmm. Well, I could have some bad hardware, its all an unknown at this point.

So I did what every good psuedo-PC person does...I turned the power switch to off. Then I turned it on.

Hmm. Same result.

This forced me to the mighty interweb to search for an answer. And I got a handful. This generic error could mean most anything, but something stuck out, so back in I went to change it.

Power on, BSOD. Hmm.

So, I'm thinking I should just go to bed, but....no. I can't. Must. Build. PC. Went back into the BIOS and reset it to failsafe (not exactly sure what that means, something akin to factory defaults) and booted again. Success! Woo Hoo! I get to the point where it wants me to tell it where to put the OS. I see an advanced option. Well, I'm nothing if not advanced, so I chose it figuring I could partition off some of my primary drive. So, I picked the primary partition, clicked format, clicked install. "No media sutible for install". What? Lets try that again (obviously if something doesn't work the first time, you try again). Same thing.

Hmm.

OK, so now what. Well, of course back to square one. Go into BIOS and tweek settings. Boot. BSOD. DAMMIT I did this before, didn't I? I was hoping to find something to do with SATA that needed to be set. No such luck and clearly Vista doesn't like what I'm changing.

Back to Failsafe settings. Boot good, get to install Vista. Pick "install" instead of "advanced options". Picks where I wanted it do be installed by itself (cleverly, I had plugged this hard drive into the number one slot), and away it went. Really didn't take terribly long. Nothing like I remember other installs. Of course my machine should be screaming.

Goes through all its reboots and what not, I create my account and there I am. Looking at the pretty screen. No idea where anything is. Its almost like when I went to 95. Sure is pretty tho.

So there you have it, the base OS is installed. The only real issue so far is the BIOS. But clearly it works. Since everything has to get patched, I'm not going to bother troubleshooting it until after everything has been updated.

And then there is that issue of the PC not ever turning off.....