Windows Vista: not all that and a bag of chips

I decided to be a good little consumer and spontaneously bought Windows Vista Home Premium and… wait for it… Halo 2! Yup, I needed to get a n new OS to play part 2 of one of the best FPS games ever – and so I did. Let me tell you, what a great decision that has turned out to be.

Third time’s the charm

I am on my third install of Vista, in just 6 short hours. I am really seeing why Lenovo is offering downgrades to folks who purchased Vista based machines from them. It’s crazy. I ran the upgrade advisor, and according to Microsoft the only thing that desperately needed attention was the RealTek audio driver. The thing is, if I let Vista do the updates, it installs some other driver (which I have yet to identify the driver or hardware) which causes the machine to send me into GP blue screen hell. The only way I have found to get around the BSOD, is to reinstall from scratch.

Finally I selected the no upgrade option for the initial install, and told it not update my machine at all. So far, so good. I updated the audio drivers, and added the drivers for my G15 Gaming Keyboard – both of which are still working great. I have yet to get Halo on the machine.

My favorite part is the boot loader, and how it gives two options:

1. Windows Vista
2. Earlier Version of Windows

Very nice, diplomatic and helpful. Like it couldn’t figure out that I had Vista – like it thought I was running Windows for Workgroups and suddenly decided to leap out of the 80’s to run Vista. That’s just lazy guys – come on! Any way, you can change the text here if you really want – I don’t care, but check this out here. You can use the built-in (BCDEDIT) editor and do it all Linux/Command lines style, or download EasyBCD to run a little GUI app to help you down the path.

All I have to say is thank the dear Lord I didn’t decide to just wing it and replace XP altogether with Vista – what a freakin’ mistake that would have been.