Last Friday I took the plunge and upgraded my main work laptop (Sony VGN-TX3XP 11" Ultra-Portable) to Windows Vista RTM.

I was expecting the process to be extremely complicated given my past experience with getting all the buttons and accessories to work due to Sony's lack of instructions, but after 5 minutes running setup (and leaving it an hour while it upgraded), I came back to find it all installed and working perfectly [:D] - even with the small 1.2GHz Centrino Solo processor and the 1GB of RAM, the system runs very smoothly and runs the Windows Aero interface flawlessly.

The Windows Vista RTM en-us build was finished last week, and the Windows team spent the time running up to RTM building dash builds for all the other languages available at ship-time. Whilst we've been running the English RTM build internally, we've not been able to talk about it publicly until RTM for obvious reasons!

Above all - if you can get hold of Windows Vista, do so and install it A.S.A.P! It has come a long *long* way since the Beta versions, there's noticeable performance and stability improvements from previous builds, even RC2 and later. MSDN and TechNet will have the keys and the ISOs available soon, and Volume Licensing customers will follow next month.

Update: To all those upgrade protestors, oh ye of little faith! I keep my system very clean from when it's installed, the only software I install is done by Group Policy, and my day-to-day user account is not a local administrator. Given that it took me 3-4 hours to go from a clean Windows XP Media Center Edition install to one that had all the drivers and buttons (volume, play, pause etc) working [thanks Sony! [:@]], I didn't want to go through that hardship again with Windows Vista. Brian Valentine has done a lot of testing of the upgrade process and that reflects the amount of work that has gone into it. A clean install is just that, a clean install, but an upgrade doesn't necessarily mean a messy system - the issue is how tidy you keep your PC in the first place, if your system is in good working order there is nothing to stop you getting a first class install of Windows Vista after an upgrade. Long are the days of Pre-Vista upgrades, Windows Me to XP was a cross kernel change so there was likely to be problems, and pre-XP doesn't bear thinking about. Before now I had never done an upgrade because I, like many users, perceived it to be messy and unstable - but the Windows Vista upgrade process is a refined and clean way to install Windows Vista. If you don't like the result, you can always go back and do a clean install, but I definitely recommend an upgrade. When you get your copy, check it out! [:)]

Andrew.

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