It goes without saying that if you intend to develop software that people will run on Windows Vista, you need to have a Vista installation to test on.
That was a good enough excuse for me, so on Saturday I bit the bullet and undertook the installation of the aforementioned Windows Vista on a relatively new PC which I'd reserved for the purpose.
I know I should have gone for a clean install, but in the end I chickened out and went for an upgrade. This wasn't too bad an option in this case because I only bought the machine recently, it's had very little software installed on it, and had very little contact with the Big Scary Internet...so the main preparatory task was to uninstall as much vendor-supplied crapware as possible (although some of it annoyingly had no entries in Add/Remove programs).
I was pretty confident that I had an adequate hardware setup for the task, because apart from the cheery little "Windows Vista Capable" sticker (which I naturally trusted implicitly), I had such essentials as reasonably nippy processors (dual core AMD64, although I installed the x86 version of Vista to avoid driver headaches), 2G of RAM, and a 256Mb ATI Radeon X1300.
I was a little concerned about SATA support in Vista, but in the event I had no hard drive issues (and I think the problems reported during the beta phase had more to do with RAID arrays, but that's something I know nothing about so I'll say no more).
Soooooooo anyway...on Saturday morning I popped a freshly burned DVD in the drive and waited for it to do its thing.
I had an early distraction when I glanced across the room at my jacket hanging on a chair, and noticed that there was a weta sitting on it, trying to look nonchalant and inconspicuous, which is pretty hard for a giant pseudo-cricket with a thorax the size of my thumb, long barbed legs, a heavily armoured head and long antennae for that extra touch of creepiness. As a representative of our unique native fauna the weta is of course a national treasure, but I generally prefer to treasure them from a distance. Manfully stifling a girly squeal, I opened a kitchen window (there was a brief lull in the permanent storm we currently call "Spring"), grabbed a kitchen brush and shovelly thing (OK I no longer remember the words for common household implements) and activated my finely-honed WEP (Weta Eviction Protocol).
So back to the joy of OS-upgrading.
After some time the message indicating the percentage of files copied reached 65%...and stayed at 65%. Time passed. Knuckles were chewed. Eventually an error dialog popped up telling me some of the source files were corrupt, or words to that effect. At this point I was slightly put out.
I may even have used intemperate language. At this stage my brain was telling me that the sensible thing to do would be to give up and wait for whichever MSDN shipment eventually includes the physical media, but since I'd checked the option agreeing to perform activation once connected to the internet (which the machine was the whole time), I had a nagging doubt that a subsequent installation attempt might run into activation difficulties. So, I went into town, bought some fresh DVD-R disks, and had another go.
This time there were thankfully no glitches during installation, although every time the progress indicators paused on the same value for a while I'd start to get twitchy. I was intrigued by the way that whenever there was a reboot (and there so very, very many of those...but I can't say we weren't warned) the system looked a little more Vista-y. Vistaesque. Whatever.
Eventually I found myself gazing upon Vista Ultimate in all its Ultimateness. One thing that surprised me was that even after I'd been prompted (again) to allow Vista to activate itself when connected to the internet, I actually had to initiate activation manually. At least it was a very quick and painless process.
While some others have reported poor performance on installing Vista I honestly can't say I've seen anything of the kind, and the graphical exprerience has been well up to the hype, handling all those gratuitous-but-nifty scenarios such as playing video in windows displayed in "Left Windows Key+Tab" mode with ease.
I'm looking forward to the frankly messy situation with the development tools being sorted out (roll on SQL Server SP2, VS2005 SP1 and VS 2005 Post-Vista Update. Yeay)...there's a lot here to like, and a lot of fascinating development opportunities.