Bob On Development

Despite my earlier rant about Vista, we are about to acquire the first Vista box in our household. My wife’s old Dell is so full of XP lint that we are faced with a clean re-install of XP, which seems like not worth the effort on a 4 year old box. So when her shiny new 2.66 ghz dual core machine with 2G of ram and the latest nVidia card with DirectX 10 shows up in a couple of weeks, it will come with 32-bit Vista Ultimate factory-installed.

This is how most people will get Vista; six months from now I doubt very much that anyone is going to offer factory-installed XP. Personally I’m waiting for SP1 and stable 64-bit drivers before even thinking about upgrading my working dev machine. But this seemed like a good opportunity to let the manufacturer worry about getting the basic system working.

One important thing for you to do before migrating to Vista is to check that all your critical apps and drivers are known to work under Vista. In our case, the only hold-out is the driver for our Epson scanners, and Epson expects to release updated drivers for our specific models in the next couple of weeks. Since we can move her to the new box incrementally, that’s fine.

Another advantage of doing this is I’ll get some Vista experience and have a limited Vista test-bed, should I end up needing it for some reason.

Still not sure what to do? Web Worker Daily just posted a really balanced and nuanced pros and cons discussion — have a look.

Update: If you’re interested in the next installment in our Vista install saga, have a look here.