Rebuilding my work computer with Vista

It’s been a hard run the past few weeks, as my work computer started behaving in all sorts of unusual ways. Windows, as we all should know, has a half-life of six months (for heavy-duty use). It’s been nine months since my last rebuild, so I’m already overdue.

The first big change this time around is going with Vista. This was a tough decision, but ultimately, I have to take the plunge at some point. Vista has been around for quite some time now, so you’d think most of the kinks are worked out. (I’m keeping my fingers crossed).

The second big change is a real attempt to use Microsoft Outlook instead of Mozilla Thunderbird. Yes, Thunderbird is a superior email product, especially when teamed with GMail (which I use for all email, business and personal). Unfortunately, Outlook has superior contact management and calendar features, and is much more effective at synchronizing with my Palm Treo.

So far, I’m dealing with the expected delays using Outlook, mostly related to its difficulty doing a first-time sync of my Google mailboxes (both are over 500MB). Turning off UAC helped get some other odd things to work (like the PPTP VPN to SoftLayer). I’m sure there will be more issues, but I’m being hopeful that they can all be resolved.

We’ll see how things are after a week of heavy use.

0 thoughts on “Rebuilding my work computer with Vista

  • Are you going with x64 version of Vista? Why did you choose Vista and not Windows Server 2008? There are some limitations of the Server (like Media Center) but for a work machine it should be a very good dev OS.

  • 32-bit version, not 64-bit. No real reason why, aside from “better != good enough”. At least I know everything I currently have works fine in 32-bit. (!)

    Why Vista and not 2008? Because I have a license for the former, not the latter. 🙂

  • Just rebuilt my PC too…this time I “upgraded to a older more familiar experience”, from Vista to XP….sooo much better….

    Vista works, but it is definitely not a stable product…I gave it a 1 year run, that was all I could handle.

Leave a Reply to brian Cancel Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes:

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.