Help me out on preparing for a Vista install...

I'm preparing for a install of Vista right now, and I'll probably be switching over next week. I'm installing Vista Home Premium with an intention to upgrade to Ultimate in a few months. I've got some important software running on my XP machine and I want to check and see if all will run well.

Can you guys tell me if any of this software will have issues with Vista?
1) Vista
2) MS Office 2003 (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, Access, Publisher, OneNote)
3) Sonic MyDVD Plus v7.0
4) Foxit Reader
5) WinDVD & DivX
6) MATLAB
7) MS Visual Studio & MS MySQL Server
8) Firefox
9) Games - Oblivion, GTA: VC, Far Cry, Halo, Diablo (I/II), FF7 & 8 (and how do they perform on Vista vs. XP)
10) Will Virtual Machines of XP work okay under VM Player 6.0 (currently in Beta)?

I already know that my printer, scanner, external hard drives will work...though my HP Deskjet 6940 has to use the default Vista driver as HP is currently working on the 'real' driver still.

My LG lightscribe should work under Vista, and my TV Tuner currently has Beta drivers for Vista.

 

I'm also looking to replace the following software...
XP->Vista

1) Norton AV & Firewall -> Trend Micro
2) Norton Ghost -> Vista's ShadowCopy
3) Norton Systemworks-> ???

 

I'm not sure about some of those, Firefox and Office will work fine, for the others there is a Windows SP2 compatibility mode which they should work decently well in. Norton I wouldn't recommend in the first place let alone for Vista, personally I don't think many Anti-virus programs are stable enough for Vista yet, and I have just gone with the $30 One Care from MS.

I would suggest if you can using PowerDVD instead WinDVD, I think it's a much better program and it runs perfectly on Vista. Divx works as normal aswell the only programs that you may have real trouble with would be the programs 2-3+ years old. I haven't really had much trouble after switching a few of my programs to the SP2 compatibility mode it definietly seems to fix the crashing issue from the Vista Beta.\\


The most important thing is making sure you have all your drivers and chipset installation software ready to go, good luck.

 

Alot of those games will take a hit on vista, I know especially GTA:VC and Diablo 2 I've played on both and gotten anywhere from 10-30% lower framerates on Vista.

However, you're graphics card is like 3 times as good as mine so all those games should still be perfectly playable in Vista.

 

nice references:
http://www.iexbeta.com/wiki/index.php/Windows_Vista_Software_Compatibility_List
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista

i 2nd Airman recommendation in getting ur chipset&drivers ready on hand before the installation

same problen have with my hp all.in.one printer, - coming to slowly realize, that even with little inconveniences at the moment with driver, in a short (long) run, vista would make honest persons out of these manufacturers who have been lazy with introducing so.so drivers just to "work"

on my box:
- AoE2 and CoD2 running great under vista, but then i do have latest ati (real) vista driver.
- FF2 and Minefiled (minus extensions&themes) r running smoothly under vista
- Foxit = totallly cool with the latest version as well
- virus scan = Avast along with windows defender & firewall
- using nero 6.6 as burning software
- powerDVD works good, so do VLC & AVS DVD player
- MS product should work, i do not use MySQL so cannot confirm that

cheers ...

 

Can you guys tell me if any of this software will have issues with Vista?
1) Vista -- Works great with itself
2) MS Office 2003 (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, Access, Publisher, OneNote) -- Works fine. Although I love the new interface in 2007
3) Sonic MyDVD Plus v7.0 -- Given that the latest release is 9.0, I would bet not
4) Foxit Reader -- should, or Acrobat 8 works great
5) WinDVD & DivX -- WinDVD 8 is designed for Vista -- Divx 6.5 works, though they say they are still working on a new version that's fully compatible
6) MATLAB -- no idea, sorry
7) MS Visual Studio & MS MySQL Server -- I believe VS2005 SP1 fixed most of its issues with Vista, though earlier version have some major issues, not sure on MySQL
8) Firefox -- works great
9) Games - Oblivion, GTA: VC, Far Cry, Halo, Diablo (I/II), FF7 & 8 (and how do they perform on Vista vs. XP) -- Oblivion, GTA:VC and Far Cry I've ran on Vista -- no clue on the others -- I'd be somewhat concerned about the really old titles there -- as for performance, it's not going to be quite at XP levels but ATI's Vista drivers are much better than Nvidia's so you're in a better position there
10) Will Virtual Machines of XP work okay under VM Player 6.0 (currently in Beta)? -- haven't tried, yet

Of course you'll need to replace many of your favorite utility programs with Vista compatible versions (A/V, firewall, etc.), but I assume you know that. Otherwise, good luck with the upgrade.

Hope that helps.

 

1) Vista might not work well with itself (see Windows ME)
3) They'll probably have a cheap $20 to upgrade to current version thingy.
5) Again, I'll probably have to update then.
6) If not then I'll have my VMs...but I do know it installs and runs out of the C:\MATLAB directory in XP.
7) Probably will be fine then...I don't really use SQL anyways.
9) If I run into trouble I'll just dual boot or VM. The harder I make it to access them the better I'll study anyways...

As far as Norton goes, they do have compatibility upgrades...but given how well Norton has worked (or not) for me with XP I'm itching to just let my license expire.

 

Can you guys tell me if any of this software will have issues with Vista?
1) Vista works!
2) MS Office 2003 (Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Excel, Access, Publisher, OneNote) works, but install the latest SP + updates
3) Sonic MyDVD Plus v7.0
4) Foxit Reader works
5) WinDVD & DivX latest version works
6) MATLAB
7) MS Visual Studio & MS MySQL Server works! You need to install SP1 + SP1 for Vista (beta) for VS.NET 2005, for SQL Server you need SP2 beta
8) Firefox works!
9) Games - Oblivion, GTA: VC, Far Cry, Halo, Diablo (I/II), FF7 & 8 (and how do they perform on Vista vs. XP)
10) Will Virtual Machines of XP work okay under VM Player 6.0 (currently in Beta)?

 

Agreed, night_2004 just go ahead and plow thru the whole install process and load up your favorite apps, if there are compatibility issues Vista will let you know and direct you to the Windows Update page to download a patch (SQL Server 2005 for example). I'd dual boot for now though, for games like Oblivion you're better off running in XP. As for running Vista on a virtual machine, haven't tried it, but I'd imagine it will be slow on the system in your signature.

 

I'm using Firefox now, but I have had lots of problems with it in Vista so far. However, the problem I've had only occurs right after installing and has a quick, permanent fix. If you run into a problem where Firefox won't start up because I needs to finish installing after it's been installed, just check the Firefox Support page about it not starting. There's a file that gets created that needs to be deleted. After that, all will be fine.

 

I'd say it doesn't work very well with itself. One of my major annoyances with the OS is that it can't decide whether to be XP, Mac OS or something entirely different. And in all three cases, it falls flat.
Another is that it simply hasn't been thought through. It has a bunch of security features that aren't properly implemented, forcing you to disable them in the end.
It has a GUI that looks nice, but... makes access to a lot of functionality harder and less intuitive.

No, it doesn't work well with itself.

Now that you mention Windows ME, I think that's probably not a bad comparison. As it is, it's little more than a quick makeover of XP just like ME was a quick makeover of 98. But it's obviously also the starting point for a lot of good ideas. They're only halfway implemented in Vista, but the next Windows might be one to watch.

VS 2k5 has a couple of issues still. You have to run as administrator to be able to debug, and other such "minor" things. It's usable, but it doesn't really play well with Vista's security model.

 

Comparing it to ME is probably the worst comparison seeing as though Vista is a whole new Kernal. Vista is much more than a GUI update.

 

No, Vista is not a whole new kernel. It's been modified, but it hasn't been rewritten from scratch. Going from Win9x to NT (2000 and XP) was a whole new kernel, but Vista isn't.

Anyway, I wasn't talking about kernels, but about Windows as a OS. ME was the previous one (98) modified and tweaked and with a load of crappily-implemented features that mostly made the OS unusable. But most of these features are basically the same as we have in XP. The difference is just that in XP, they actually work.

And from that point of view, I think it's not a bad comparison. Vista is the previous version (XP) revisited. A bunch of features have been implemented, but are mostly just annoyances you end up forced to disable.
Still, they're new features that, in theory, could be very useful. And maybe they'll become that in the next version of Windows.

 

Guys...it was only a joke. I know Vista is in a whole new league than ME.

 

Jalf, Vista is not based off XP, it is based off Windows Server 2003. If you mean to say that it has XP functionality built in, then yes that's true.

 

1) Vista's running better than expected right now...I've only come across a few solvable problems.
2) Office is fine too.
3) Surprisingly Sonic MyDVD v7 worked! I had to run the installer in SP2 compatibility mode, and DLA didn't install (I don't care since I never liked DLA).
4) Foxit was fine...though for some reason when I let it be the default PDF reader Vista kept insisting I used Adobe...for some reason I cannot force it to stay with Foxit yet.
5) WinDVD works fine though...though it does occasionally ask me to make it the default player again. Not too sure what's up with that...
6) MATLAB was fine, but the installer forced me out of Aero until it was done. MATLAB itself is okay with Aero though.
7) Haven't installed VS yet...maybe tomorrow.
8) FF seems to freeze up occasionally...I think it might be because of the slow internet connection here.
9) So far I've only installed Oblivion...it seems okay but I don't have time to play yet.
10) VMWare is a joke...it froze my computer EVERY time I tried to run it. Admin mode, SP2 mode, nothing gets it to work. I don't exactly care for VPC2007 either but it looks like I'm stuck with it if I want to use it. I don't like how I cannot configure it to see my data drive though...maybe I'll find a work around with shared folders and the like.