I haven’t updated my desktop machine for about 5 years (!). Yeah, I’m cheap that way. It just wasn’t obvious that any of the advances would stabilize for the foreseeable future – processor sockets would change all the time, 64bit was slowly becoming mainstream, memory speeds were advancing once or twice a year, so I just waited.

Finally when my wife started developing software with Visual Studio 2005 it was obvious that a 5 year old computer is not really up to a task. Fortunately, this coincided with Intel taking the performance/price crown and the choice of the components was more or less trivial.  So I built up a new machine (details in the next post).

This in turn coincided with the launch of Windows Vista. Contrary to many nay-sayers I am actually excited about the launch of the new Windows and was eager to install it. I used beta 2 and RC1 before and knew what to expect.

But I forgot the most obvious thing: we only need the OS so that the applications we use can run. In and of itself, the OS is almost useless. I don’t use anything esoteric, just a few Web servers, Source Code Management and the SQL Server 2005 Express plus some multimedia viewers and such.

Installation of Vista was extremely smooth and fast. But then it hit me – I did not check if the apps I am about to install are going to work or not.

I had no idea if Subversion would work, but assumed it will. The same with SourceGear Vault, which is a .NET (1.1) app/web service. I definitely expected Microsoft products to work, including Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express 2005.

Needless to say, I was disappointed to find that Vault (server) does not work at all (no workaround), that SQL Server 2005 Express probably works (but is not supported until Service Pack 2) and that there is a beta update(!) of the Service Pack 1 for Visual Studio 2005 that still does not resolve all the issues!

At that point I stopped and did not even check if the Apache 2.0.x works or if the Subversion works – if Microsoft was unable to patch its own products in time for the release of Windows Vista, what are the chances of the Open Source developers providing a free product for no fee (thus, generally having no pressure with release schedules)?

I ended up installing Windows XP. Believe it or not, it took longer installing and patching it than installing Vista, mainly because of the 64 updates from the Internet(this was applied to the Service Pack 2).

I am really annoyed by this and have been looking for an alternative. The obvious one is to move the existing  machine into a VM, then install Vista and then run the XP as a VM. But for that to work, the VM app has to be Vista compatible. I use VMWare and am very happy with it, but the quick check shows that the only Vista compatible version is 6.0, which is currently in beta. I’m (temporarily) stuck.

Really, really, irritating.