Well I got Windows Vista installed this past week, and let me tell you it's been fun. Seriously, so far so good. I had Windows XP Professional on my PC, and recently upgraded to Vista Home Premium. Actually, I didn't upgrade to Home Premium. Rather I backed up all my shit and did a clean install of the new Vista operating system. You see I did a fresh install of XP Pro only a month or two ago and was planing on just doing a upgrade to Vista, not a full fresh install. Well it turns out you cannot do a upgrade from XP Pro to Vista Home Premium, so I had to backup everything and do a clean install.

This was kind of a hassle, but again I only did a new installation of XP a month or two ago, so it was no big deal. I just had to backup my Outlook emails and My Documents folder, and every thing else was cake. When doing the installation of Vista everything was OK. To install this full version I simply booted from the Vista DVD (after everything was backed up onto another drive) and formated and installed Vista onto my primary drive. Installation was incredible simple. A lot nicer and quicker than Win XP, and let me tell you I've done plenty of XP installations, and they are not always fun. But Vista was a breeze.

After everything was installed and running, Vista did a check on some upgrades and recommended that I update some of my chipset and OS drivers. I did that with little to no hassle, and in no time it was running smoothly. There was a couple hiccups that I did not like though. They all included beta drivers. You see, a lot of companies still only have beta drivers for Vista, which perplexes me. Vista has been in development for several years and still some companies do not have proper drivers out for it. I am mainly complaining about Nvidia, Creative, and HP.

Well, it's not as bad as I make it sound. You see I had to manually install the drivers for Nvidia, Creative, and my HP printer. And on all their sites they claim that their Vista drivers are still in beta form. This kind of ticked me off, but I downloaded and installed them anyways. In the end all of these drivers have been OK, with little to no issues so far.

I first installed the Creative beta drivers. I have a Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 sound card. Creative only offers a beta Vista driver that was released in the middle of January. I had plenty of issues with Creative's drivers and Vista while going through the beta/RC Vista releases. Some of these issues included losing sound completely or not getting my 5.1 surround sound in different applications. But with the final release of Vista and Creative's newest beta drivers, the sound works great, including video games and media applications like Windows Media Player 11 or Windows Media Center.

Next I tried to install my printer drivers. I have a HP Photosmart 7550 printer. Going to HP's site they don't yet have a Vista driver for this particular printer. But they had a really, really good help section that helped me install a Vista driver for another type printer that would work for my 7550 printer (Update: several people have asked where this article is. You can locate it here). I was extremely impressed by HP's support in the matter. They had a well documented web page telling me how to install another HP printer driver for my printer. So far I can print anything I want to. But still, why no proper Vista drivers?

Finally, I installed my Nvidia graphic drivers. I had heard some horror stories about Nvidia's Vista drivers and was hesitant to install Vista because of them, but in the end decided to install Vista anyways. So I installed Nvidia's drivers, the 100.54 series.  The installation went no problem. But then I had to test out my PC games. So I installed a few of them, including Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Prey, and Oblivion. After all games were installed and patched to their current versions, I tried them all out. They all ran pretty good. I had perfect 5.1 surround sound in all of them, and no graphically glitches. The only problem I has was with HL2: Episode One. The game ran a lot slower for me than it did on my XP setup. This is probably due to Nvidia's drivers. Otherwise, in some situations, the games looked better in Vista than they did in XP. I'm mostly taking about Half-Life 2. The game seemed to run smoother for me, and a lot of the texture looked a lot more crisp and sharp. This may of just been me, but it looked somewhat better in Vista than it did in XP. DirectX 10? Who knows.

In the end, I am very happy I installed Vista over XP. Not only does it look a hell of a lot better than XP, but it seems to run my apps and games a lot better also. But of course, being a PC gamer that I am, I have the hardware to run it. Vista will have some trouble running on older machines that are four to five years old. But you cannot blame that on Microsoft. We all know that technology grows and improves faster than we can keep up, and Microsoft is just taking advantage of this newer technology. If you are a PC gamer, or if you have fairly new PC running XP, then I highly recommend you upgrade to Vista. Sure, there are a few kinks and tweaks when it comes to games and drivers, but that's not really an issue with Vista as it's an issue with the developer of such software and should be ironed out in the next few weeks or months.