I got a new laptop last month and as has been the case for a while with Windows-based systems, it came with VISTA. I took it as a professional challenge to better understand the problems people have with this operating system and was determined to master it anyway.
Getting any new computer up to speed is an exercise that requires tremendous patience under the best of circumstances. There are applications to be loaded, patches to be installed and hours of configuration, which is tedious and fraught with the potential for error.
In my case, it was even more complicated because I wanted to put 2008 versions of my development software on the new machine.
I set up a new Administrator account, but found it was still necessary to explicitly run software “as Administrator”, example below.
I eventually had to edit the registry to implement mixed authentication on SQLExpress2005.
It took a colleague to help me figure out how to configure my desktop to display on multiple monitors. As usual, Microsoft decided to make just enough subtle changes in menus to leave one in the dark and wanting to throttle their marketing people.
The laptop came with limited licenses on Microsoft Office, so I ended up uninstalling all of it and installing Open Office instead, which I like very much.
I had a learning curve with setting up database connections and projects in Visual Studio 2008 and websites in IIS6.0.
I tried to import data to a SQL2005 database via the SQL Server 2008 Management Studio from an Excel spreadsheet and was running into all kinds of permission problems. I finally solved these after stumbling onto a forum that explained that Management Studio doesn’t play well with VISTA’s UAC, so you have to run it “as Administrator”.