My Vista saga, part 3 the finale–or is it?

In part 1 I talked about trying to get Vista to work on my laptop.  In part 2 I went into my second try, which again resulted in me returning to XP.  So here in part 3, I’ll bring you to the final aftermath—getting back up and running again.

By Friday night I had XP installed, updated, and started reloading applications.  Again Carbonite saved my tush.  All my settings were saved.  All my documents were saved (I had a backup of all my documents … except for strangely all my pictures … more on that later).  From my previous experience coming back from computer disaster with Carbonite I knew that I just had to wait.  It takes time to download and restore all the files.  I left my machine on overnight for this.  Saturday morning, a lot of files were back.  My Documents folder wasn’t complete, but that was okay because I had a back up on an external drive.  Outlook was fine.

Okay, not really.  I figured out the right way to really restore Outlook files from backup is to let Outlook create all it’s stuff, then replace with your backup copies.  Took me about 30 mins to get it all worked out.

What about applications?  This is going to be a post on it’s own, but I looked at it as a chance to pare down my system.  Did I really need all those different apps?  How often was I using them?  So far I’ve installed most of my core apps again (still have to download my fav FTP client).

Serial numbers?  Ah, again a benefit of Gmail.  I have all of them archived there (in addition to being in my Outlook files somewhere.

The irony here is that while I’m finally sitting down to a stable system with most of my files back (for some strange reaon my pictures didn’t make it onto the external drive, thank God Carbonite had them all and they are being restored as I write this), I’m still tempted by the daemon Vista.

I feel like I should have stuck it out.  I should have maybe gone for a dual boot or something.  Have XP and Vista running.  Keep trying to make it work.

I’m on the fence.  I’ve told some friends, and now all of you, that I have an OEM copy of Vista for Business (64 bit) available to buy.  I’m hoping, actually, that someone will leap up and want it (I’m only selling to recover costs and it will cost you less than even the Vista Business upgrade price) so I won’t be tempted to try it again.

Bottom line on my advice … if you have a 64 bit machine, be very, very cautious about switching to Vista 64 bit (I don’t know if 32 would have been okay for me).  For machines with Conexant-powered sound it looks like the drivers just aren’t there for you right now.