I will say this, it is now six months on into Vista's launch and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of PC's on which we've worked on Vista. I'm not sure if that is relative to Vista's stability or to the lack of consumer uptake.
On to the nuts and bolts.
Part 1: Prepare Your System
Make sure you have a good backup of your currently running system. This means doing one of two things:
- Using a disk imaging tool such as Acronis True Image to make a complete image of your current operating system, files and documents such that you can, if neccessary, just restore your entire pre-Vista operating system in place.
- Doing a manual backup of your files to an external drive in case something happens during the upgrade.
I doing method two in combination with installing Vista clean onto a new hard drive. The down-side is that I will have to reinstall all my applications again. The upside is that I will have a clean disk and a clean Vista OS (as opposed to upgrading XP). Plus, if I end up hating Vista, I can just swap out disks and go back to the status quo ante.
I've taken the opportunity to upgrade the stock Matsushita 80GB 5200 RPM SATA drive in my HP nx9420 laptop to a new Seagate 100GB 7200RPM HD. I'm hoping the faster spindle speed on the Seagate drive will improve Vista's performance as I don't have a dedicated video card.
Backups done, I'm about to do the switch. More later. For your amusement, I have attached a humorous Vista Upgrade Decision Tree flowchart. Mildly offensive language. Click to enlarge.
