When our copies of Vista arrived on campus I was anxious to try it out. My Lenovo desktop machine has plenty of RAM which made it the perfect candidate. Furthermore, all my work is in support of other people who do work in various departments – the world won’t stop if I back up my documents every once in a while to reformat my system. My big problem at this stage was that I didn’t want to wait around to reformat. I decided to see how smooth the XP – Vista upgrade path was.

The system worked fine after the upgrade. There were some annoying nag windows on boot-up which got old after a while but didn’t stop me from doing work. My TPM security chip didn’t function after the upgrade. I also noticed that a lot of hard drive space was taken up for no good reason.

 Today I decided to try a clean install. I had planned on doing to Complete PC Backup (see my blog posts about that debacle) but instead manually cleaned up and backed up all documents and e-mail. I found that about 80GB of storage is now available which had been used in the upgrade configuration. Another small problem was the slow response of Internet Explorer in opening a new tab. Tabs are great, but not if you could open a new window in less time! Tabs are nice and snappy right now.

My advice to anyone wanting to test Vista is to use the Clean install option. You will probably have to boot to the CD and select an Advanced Drive options button in order to format or manipulate partitions, but it is worth it.

Next phase: downloading Lenovo apps to see if I can use the TPM chip!