Vista Installer
So I’m installing Vista Home Basic for a client. This is my first time doing it, so I figured I’d record my thoughts here. I mean, Vista is crap, let’s not think for a second that’ll change, but I’m willing to give a fair shake to the install process.
Currently I’m staring at the default sort of borealis looking background and a mouse cursor. There appears to be some activity.
As an aside, I don’t know why SMART is disabled by default in so many boards.
There we go. About 4 minutes of waiting for the first step of the installer.
Second “step” is just a “What you should know before taking it deep in the pooper” and “Let Windows fail to repair your computer”. Naturally these are just my cynical translations.
Now waiting some more. About 3 minutes to get to the product key entry screen.
Waiting again. “Only” about a minute to bring up the license agreement, which I already accepted, apparently, by opening the cd package.
Haha. Now we have two options. Upgrade, which is greyed out because this is a new drive, or “Custom(advanced)” which is just a clean install.
There looks like some driver loading options on the disk screen, which is a step up from frantically hitting F6. Now moving on to “Installing Windows”.
About 10 minutes on that screen, now rebooting.
Preparing to start for the first time. Thankfully that only took a few seconds. Now we’re “completing installation”. This appears to be a hardware detection routine, judging from the screen blanking. Now a black screen, at first with a mouse cursor, but now just black. Looks like the monitor has lost signal. I… can only assume that something has gone awry. I think 3 minutes is long enough, time to reset.
Alrighty then. Now we’re at the account creation screen. A few more basic settings. Now Windows is “checking the computer’s performance”. Christ this seems like a waste of time. Thank goodness this is an advanced install, where this sort of thing is skippable…. oh.
Coming up on 10 minutes of this performance check.
Well. Over 30 minutes of that, let’s see if resetting will skip it. We will be bold and select “Start Windows Normally”.
It’s forced me back to the “create a user” section, even though apparently the user I made is already there. Off to the races? No. I’m staring at the background, no cursor or icons, watching it flog the hard drive.
Keep in mind, this a pretty good workstation. 2GB of RAM, DDR2 800, and a 2.4GHz dual core AMD. Thankfully it seems to have skipped the performance shit this time.
Man. That was unacceptable. Wastes of time everywhere, and very little benefit. The only improvement, in real terms, is the driver section for storage. That’s literally it.