DevBlog

I am blogging this from my freshly installed version of Windows Vista Ultimate. I was surprised to get the email late Thursday that because I was a technical beta tester for Windows Vista and reported a bug that I was getting a free copy of Windows Vista. I chose Vista Ultimate and proceeded to download. I don't know if all the other beta testers were downloading or there was a problem with my connection, but I couldn't get speeds better than 40K on my high speed cable connection. I just let it run all night. When I got up Friday morning, it was done. I burned it to disk and got a CD Key (this will come back to bite me later).

I decided that I wasn't ready to take the full plunge into Vista yet. While I did some testing with Beta 1, I hadn't done anything with it since. So, I decided that I would buy a new hard drive and dual boot. Yesterday I went to CompUSA and purchased a new Maxtor 320Gig SATA II drive.

This morning I went through the following install steps:
1. Shutdown Windows XP and install the new drive.
2. Reboot into XP to make sure the new drive was installed and working. I ran the Maztor utilities to partition the drive into a single partition.
3. Reboot to the Windows Vista install DVD.
4. Attempted to enter the product key. I was told it was invalid.
5. Reboot to XP. Find the email from the Microsoft Connect team. It says to install Vista without the key. That would give me 30 days to work with it, but I should have the key within a week.
6. Reboot to the Vista install DVD. Click next when asked for the product key. The install process started.
7. Then I got an error message that a file couldn't be read from the DVD. Looks like the disk is bad.
8. Reboot to XP.
9. Burn a new DVD.
10. Reboot to new Vista install DVD.
11. Go through the install steps.
12. At some point, the PC rebooted and I was met with a dual boot prompt. I choose Vista.
13. Vista boots!!!
14. Setup Administrator account and standard user account for me.
15. Log on as me. Post blog entry.

All told, it took about 90 minutes but that's with all the reboots back to XP, burning a new DVD, and installing the new hard drive. Rick Strahl has commented that it took him about 20 minutes to get Vista up and running. I think the actual Vista process for me, once I got the new DVD and drive installed, was probably about the same amount of time. This was definately the simplest Windows install process ever.