So I decided to do an upgrade to Vista Ultimate on my laptop instead of a clean install. I figure, if it doesn’t work out well, I can always do a clean install. To jump the gun… I love Vista! The Aero interface is terrific. And it’s working almost perfect…

The install itself took, I shit you not, 5.5 hours. It’s not like I have a slow computer either. My laptop rocks a 2.16ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM. Not too shabby. It’s just painfully slow to do an upgrade. Once I finally got into Vista, I had a few issues with programs that needed to re-installed because they lost their activations, particularly AVG AntiVirus and Nero 7. I can’t install the Visual Studio 2005 SP1, but I hear that’s more a common thing than a Vista issue. Few small things here and there (sleep settings for my laptop, sync’ing with my BlackBerry), but everything seems to be up and running fine. I only have 2 programs that don’t work under Vista, both having to do with my Nikon dSLR. The first is Nikon Capture NX, their Raw processing software. Second is DxO Optics Pro 4, which also is a Raw processing and image enhancement software. Both assure me that new versions will be available “shortly”, but both also said they don’t have a definite ETA. I guess I’ll just run that stuff on my desktop PC for now.

Overall, it went fairly smooth, other than than ridiculous amount of time it took. I’m happy I made the upgrade. Now just waiting for Office 2007 Enterprise to arrive…