Saturday morning I installed Vista Ultimate on my PC. OH No Mr Bill my PC cries! Suprisingly enough the PC was crying wolf. Initially there was a number of unknown devices in the Device Manager. While it did take a while to correct, it wasn't all that bad since the Device Manager was able to locate drivers for all but one device over the Internet.
Not sure which device isn't working yet but likely eventually I'll figure it out. One device in peticular though that is working is my Video Capture card. The difference though is that I now have to capture video using Windows Media Center and not the normal software that came with the card. This poses a different problem.
What I am used to is capturing TV shows to an mpeg2 file and editing out the commercials using Womble Mpeg Video Wizard DVD and then exporting it to an .avi file to save on my media server drive. Then stream it to the TV on demand. Windows Media center saves files to a proprietary format called DRV-MS. I haven't tried this yet but apparently the Vista version of Windows Movie Maker can dump the video out as an uncomressed .AVI file, This part is good as I have several editing options available for those file types.
Okidata has yet to produce a Vista compatible driver for my laser printer. Their site says its possible to use the XP driver to get it to work. While installing it was comparible to trying to manually installing a device in Windows 95, I finally did at least get it working.
Communicating with my Ubuntu Server was a little challenging but not all that bad. Networking is one of the things Vista can do. It only took a minor configuration change and a reboot and I had it working.
Eventually, the world will catch up and everything will likely work well on Vista. Since I have a reasonably fast system, so far it seems to perform well...but I haven't infected my software with it yet either. I imagine it will be quite some time before I am ready to fully commit to it.
Unfortunately though, I do encounter situations that I need to gain some familiarity with it to do my job. This means going out on a limb before I fall too far behind.
The good thing, is I have it installed on a spare hard drive which easily removable so I can play when I get a chance and still get down to business when I need to. Even if I hose the system installing and testing software to figure out what is going to work for me...I have a easy way to bail out.