I spent the majority of yesterday moving my primary laptop to Vista.  I got a new 100G/7200RPM drive, so I decided to chew up some of the space with a dual boot.  I got to late last night (about 6am) when I decided it was a dead proposition and I needed to revert to my XP SP2 desktop.  Good news is that a majority of the software I loaded on Vista worked without a hitch.  At the end of the day it came to that a few critical pieces of software weren’t Vista-ready.

Vista Setup

Getting Vista installed was a snap and with the exception of the touchpad driver, everything worked flawlessly (and after installing the XP touchpad driver I was good to go).

Productivity Software

I installed Office XP to have Word and PowerPoint to do some work where Office 2007 might cause some compatibility issues.  I then installed Office 2007 over it and it worked well side-by-side.  I’ve been told that Outlook 2007 and Outlook XP won’t work side-by-side so I didn’t even try.

Outlook 2007 was a big problem.  While it worked as advertised (and my SpamBayes Add-inworked well), I couldn’t search at all my messages.  Outlook 2007 seemed to want to use the Vista built-in search which wasn’t working with Outlook, and brute force searching was simply broken.  The rest of Office 2007 seemed to work fine though I live in Outlook.

I tried installing Small Business Accounting and it depended on .NET Framework 1.1 which wasn’t installed curiously. I installed the .NET Framework 1.1 with SP1, but Vista complained the whole way and in the end it still didn’t work.

Development Software

I got Visual Studio 2005 installed without a hitch.  I did have to install IIS (as its not installed by default) before installing 2005, but it worked well.

I installed SQL 2000 and SQL 2005, having to tell Vista to install it even though it told me it didn’t work right on Vista.  I had to be sure.  After installation, SQL 2000 worked fine.  SQL 2005 on the other hand is completely broken under Vista.  The server works, but none of the tools work at all.

Conclusion

I had decided to live with most of the problems of Vista but the SQL 2005 tools not working became the death-knell of my ability to go Vista now.  Beta 2 is looking very good, its just not quite ready yet.  Too bad, I was really hoping to go that direction.

On a side note, the user protection stuff that was constantly asking permission to do simple things (e.g. deleting a file from the desktop) was frustrating and I ended up turning it off and being a bad boy and running as full-admin all the time.

My only other comment on Vista was that explorer.exe was constantly crashing and losing my optical drives.  It came up fast, but was part of my frustration.