Just bought myself a shiny new PC from Dell that came with Vista pre-installed. I liked the GUI, very slick and intuitive. But within 3 days I’d been forced to do the following tweaks just to get things running the way I wanted..

• Hacked the registry to try & get the display to run at the native resolution of my flatscreen (1680×1050)
• Downloaded PowerStrip and used that, after the above didn’t work
• Disabled UAC (User Account Control) as it was preventing PowerStrip from working correctly
• Disabled IPv6 to try & get uTorrent to work
• Then disabled Windows Firewall, Network Topology Discovery…etc etc… (yet more registry hacks along the way)

uTorrent still didn’t work… Azureus also caused the network to hang. Noticed along the way that Vista seemed to be flooding my home network too.

So thought, sod it - blew the OS away and tried to install XP SP2… That of course led to another can of worms… First off, XP kept blue-screening after getting halfway through the install.  Guessed it might be something to do with disk drivers as the new box has SATA.  Disabled RAID in the BIOS and tried again.  Still no luck.  Found out from the web that XP doesn’t come with SATA drivers so you need to supply them on a floppy at boot time. Yes, a floppy… Who uses them any more?  So ended up slipstreaming the Intel drivers onto a new install CD using nLite.

Got the box up and running and all that was left to do was get networking up and running so I could download the rest of the drivers.  Intel “All in one” driver was 86 megs and that took an hour to download as their site was super slow.  (My first PC had an 80 meg HDD - oh how things have changed).

Anyway all up and running nice and smoothly now

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 6th, 2007 at 9:42 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.