Vista Upgrade of Sony Vaio AR

I did not want to have to reinstall all my applications and do a Clean install of Vista Home Premium which would involve hours reinstalling Visual Studio .Net, SQL Server and all the development tools and programs.

Preparation

Ran the vista upgrade advisor and it told me to uninstalled McAffee virus protection, Toshiba Bluetooth stack and Sonic Solutions Software. It didn't tell me to uninstall ZoneAlarm but the upgrade failed a few times until I figured out the DLL that was causing it to fail was from ZoneLabs.

Then I ran the upgrade to Vista Home Premium that I got from the Vista Express Upgrade program. This was because I bought my laptop between October 2006 and January 2007 so was entitled to a free version of Vista.

Vista's first boot

Nothing worked, the screen was in the default 1024x768 mode and very few devices detected.

Went through the Driver installation CD and Applications CD received from Sony. You can also get these drivers and apps from

http://support.vaio.sony.ie/downloads/updates/updates.asp?site=voe_en_IE_cons&c=0&s=VGN-AR&m=2418&os=7&osl=1

The Sound drivers were the most problematic. I have to uninstall all drivers from the windows device manager and then run the "SigmaTel" installer in "XP compatibility mode" before it would install correctly. Now I have sound working from the headphone ports etc (which the default windows sound driver knew nothing about). When I was using the new "Media Centre" (which is a big improvement on the MCE 2005 version) to play tunes at a poker night I was having at home the audio kept breaking up maybe once every 3-4 tracks.

The built in WebCam is still not working after installing the correct apps and drivers. Getting the latest version of the graphics card drivers was difficult for the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7600 GT card on this laptop, I tried numerous installations which failed. I will also keep an eye for updated NVIDIA drivers because currently 1080p playback through the HDMI port is not available in vista (but is under XP). I have yet to get a proper 1080p LCD TV to take advantage of this so it's not really an issue for me yet…

Installing Applications

I installed the FREE AGV virus scanner and an updated free ZoneAlarm for Vista. Photoshop elements which was pre-installed at version 4 was upgraded to version 5 for free to work under vista using the upgrade tools on the applications cd.

Unreal tournament 2004 and Flatout 2 are the only 2 decent games I have installed and they both run under vista without a problem.

To connect my Pocket PC phone worked ok with the new Sync centre but there is an upgrade for the "Windows Mobile Device Center" available for Vista version 6.1 that is worth getting and replaces activesync.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/devicecenter.mspx

Software Development under Vista

Visual Studio .Net Pro 2005 and SQL Server 2005 worked ok for me (when running as an Administrator by changing the shortcuts) but you may need to run the SQL 2005 Vista Provisioning tool after the upgrade the get the security permissions setup correctly.

Built in Windows Firewall, allow IIS web traffic if you want to host web apps. To do this turn on the inbound firewall rule for IIS traffic (port 80). Start à Admin Tools à Windows firewall with advanced security, look in the "Inbound rules" section and turn on the "World wide web services HTTP traffic in" rule. Otherwise your PC will be inaccessible to anyone trying to get to a website hosted on your IIS machine. Better yet, uninstall it and use ZoneAlarm.

The new IIS console takes some getting used to, I had to reconfigure some previously working IIS virtual directories by setting them to use a "classic .Net 2.0" application pool, then they worked fine.

Performance

The performance score I got for Vista was 4.5 with the 2gb of memory being the lowest thing that dragged the other scores down. I have tried putting in a SD card into the built in slot and used it for "readyboost" but have not noticed any speed improvements yet and the additional memory from the SD card does not show up in Task Manager, I will leave it there and monitor its progress.

Java weirdness

I use Firefox as my default browser for both development and general surfing. The main thing I have to use internet explorer for is online banking using AIB Internet Business Banking ( IBB ) and to file company returns using the Revenue On-Line service (ROS) www.ros.ie.

Both these sites worked under XP but neither worked under vista at first. I think IBB uses the Microsoft Java Virtual Machine (VM) and ROS uses the generic Sun VM. To get both of these to work I have to do some trickery. First install the latest Java from Sun this is required to work for ROS this will enable the option under Tools menu, "Internet Options", Advanced in Internet Explorer saying "Use JRE 1.6.????? for <applet> (requires restart)". To get ROS to work this must be ticked, to get IBB to work this must be unticked. Both work now under these circumstances. You have to install KCrypro for the ROS site with Internet Explorer running in Administrator mode.

Conclusion

It took a LOT of time and effort to upgrade from XP to Vista and some things still do not work. I am unsure how much easier it would have been if I went for the "clean" install instead of the upgrade but I suspect I would have had the same device driver issues. I can't help feeling I have taken a step backwards to get this latest whizzbang features.

Vista looks nice, Flip3d gets ohh's and ahh's whenever you show it to someone, I thought this was originally a gimmick but I have actually found it quite useful when switching between similar windows that look the same in a small thumbnail that ALT+Tab would give you. The Windows Explorer enhancements, new start menu etc are all more intuitive. User account control is annoying but I am leaving it on for the time being to see if it actually protects me from a stupid decision at some stage.

Update: 23rd July 2007

If you want to get approx 4GB of space back after upgrading from XP then the $INPLACE.~TR and $WINDOWS.~Q folders are left over temp files from the upgrade and can be safely deleted.

If you don't feel comfortable deleting them outright, fire up the Disk Cleanup utility (click Start and type Disk), select the Files discarded by Windows upgrade item, and then click OK.