The Vista View: Rated Average

I've finally dove into the Vista realm. Though technically I've used Vista since it's Beta and RC days. 

I think I caught a Blaster worm thru my USB flash drive from that printing shop who claimed that the .exe program in my flash drive was a virus/trojan horse. 

Ok, so after inserting the flash drive in my system, suddenly, I got that dreaded 60 secs shut down prompt. I tried playing around, you know, troubleshooting, but I guess my patience got to me and was not in the mood to play around. I decided to sacrifice the few photos and files I have in my un-partitioned hard drive. So the only solution I have at that moment was, to reformat. So, I popped out my XP CD and did a clean install. But after the whole process, I found out that I didn't have the drivers of my motherboard, thus I can't connect to the internet because I'm missing the Ethernet drivers. SHIT! I'm getting impatient.

I changed, walked all the way to the nearest SM (didn't bother to bring the car because it will just add time when I look for a parking space), and went straight to the Tech Shops. I went to Silicon Valley, asked how much Vista is, P4500 for the Home Basic and P7000 for the Home Premium (didn't bother to ask for the Ultimate version). Went to Octagon, but all they had was the Vista Starter Pack P2200. So I went back to Silicon Valley and asked for the Vista Home Premium (of course this is the OEM version), and the lady told me that there's a discount and I'm getting it at P6700 (hmmmm though I think even if there's no discount I'm still decided on getting one). 

At home, I inserted it into the DVD drive, restarted the PC, but no "press any key to boot from CD/DVD". WHAT? Perhaps I got a fake DVD? Yeah right! Ok, tried it a couple more times but still no progress. Ok, what to do now? I remembered that I have a downloaded Vista iso disk. Got it, and inserted it. THERE! Booted from that DVD and was able to get into the install part. Ok, here I am, holding a genuine Vista Install Disk but I'm using a bootlegged copy to install Vista. Yeah, confusing! Now, it's asking me for a product key. I entered the product key that came with my sparkling new DVD install disk and prayed profusely that the series of number would work. And it did! 

The installation was smooth and I was able to set up the OS in no time. I installed Vista drivers for my motherboard, soundcard and videocard. Installed drivers for my Samsung Laser Printer and Brother all-in-one printer, my wireless Logitech keyboard and mouse. Went into the web, downloaded and installed Firefox, Chrome, iTunes, Picasa 3. Installed Microsoft Office 2007 suite. Re-installed Palm Desktop and Hotsync Manager, all my Palm Centro apps including ePocrates, Merck Mobile Medicus, and Documents-to-Go.

In other words, I have revived the persona of my "old" PC, but renovated it into a new system. So why is it a big deal? Well, I am still convinced that Vista is a raw operating system and comparable to Windows XP, it's fairly a half-baked OS. I still consider XP as the more "stable" sibling. A friend of mine has been convincing me to "upgrade" to Vista, to be honest, one of the reasons why I don't is that, I find it expensive to spend on something that will be "obsolete" in a couple of years. Another thing that prevents me from using Vista is the availability of the drivers for my peripherals. Good thing, before I really decided to get the original software (up to now, it's hard to find a "reliable" bootlegged Vista), I looked for drivers for my peripherals, and Vista drivers were already available. So here I am, using a PC with Vista Home Premium available.