joeware - never stop exploring... :)

I tried to upgrade a Vista RC2 to RTM last night, it didn’t work so well. Normally I don’t upgrade, I don’t trust upgrades. It wasn’t my computer though and there was a bunch of installed software and I didn’t want to mess with it. RC2 had been running fine and it wouldn’t have needed an upgrade only the time bomb is May 31 and it was about to die.

So I said, MSFT says upgrades work fine now… So I tried… It loaded up and then started blue screening only it was bouncing so fast I couldn’t even read the blue screen message and nothing was being written to the harddrive even though it was all configured. I booted in safe mode and it during driver loading it listed crcdisk.sys as the last loaded but no clue what it did after that when it crashed again. I tried a repair, nothing, tried chkdsk, nothing, got a command prompt from the repair screen and the drive was working just fine as I could read anything I wanted. Nothing funky with the system that I could ascertain, no additional drivers needed for the disk drive, etc.

Performed an upgrade rollback which went quite well. Started unloading any “touchy” software such as Daemon tools, etc. Cleaned up the disk really well, told it to update everything to latest versions, etc. Ran upgrade advisor which said everything was perfect. Started upgrade again, went beautifully until I notice the machine rebooting over and over again. Same issue. I told it to rollback again and went to sleep.

Next morning (i.e. today) I started into it again and removed even more software and told it to export the settings for the users (using the Migration wizard stuff to a file – pretty cool) and also Windows Mail account and messages exports. Upgraded again, still no joy. Rolled back, then told it to install a clean second copy of the OS. That worked flawlessly… damn upgrade.

So I installed a clean version on the original partition and just went on from there where I likely should have started in the first place. As you can imagine, I am no closer to trusting upgrades. I spent the better part of the day reloading all of the software and getting the settings right.

Some complaints:

1. The settings export missed things like backgrounds, etc. Still trying to work out everything it missed.

2. Windows Mail lets you export accounts and messages. Message import worked great. Account import blew up with some odd error. I then try to set the account up manually, it is a hotmail account… Guess what, Windows Mail in RC2 lets you access hotmail, Windows Mail in RTM doesn’t… Beauty. I found a tool called FreePops which helped out here. Loaded it and then configured Windows Mail to get my hotmail through the freepops localhost server. If I hadn’t found that, the mailbox would have been converted over to GMAIL with Hotmail just autoforwarding. No clue why Microsoft thinks it makes sense to turn off POP3 like that. Not like they are delivering anything else that would make someone choose them over one of the other free email providers.

3. Trying to clean up the old instances of Windows was terrifically painful. Well the old instance on C: wasn’t too bad, the cleanup tool cleaned it right up. But cleaning up the temp copy on D:, the cleanup tool completely frelled it up and missed most of it. I then had to go in, take ownership of many folders including Windows, and several under Program Files and then after taking ownership set the ACLs so that I had FULL CONTROL so I could delete the damn things. Took me a while to figure out why I had 2GB missing until I realized the hibernation file had to be taken out the same way.

4. I went looking for the background image and found on the new install that it should be in a specific folder in the users folder of the old install which was, nicely enough saved (until I smoked it). Well I went into the folder and sure enough, MSFT doesn’t feel you should see that stuff so hides it by default, luckily I had the path so I went in anyway. Then once in the folder structure, I tried to search for all JPGs, it couldn’t find a thing. I do the search from the command prompt and I hit several hundred JPG files…

I don’t know about you, but Vista is getting too much up into my grill and assuming too much about what I want it controlling. Getting to be time for my yearly FreeBSD check up. I mean I am thrilled about many of the underlying security enhancements in Vista but the “for use by computer newbies” enhancements that I cannot shut off are too much. If Microsoft continues to assume all of its users are morons, that is, in fact, what will happen as the non-morons get sick of being treated that way and wander off and use other OSes.

  joe