The other day, I purchased a Windows Vista Home Premium laptop computer for travelling around with and for web development whilst enjoying an Americano! Anyway, after stripping away the sheer load of rubbish that came pre-installed with it (and by rubbish, we're talking Norton, Works, internet connections, media players etc) I had a rocking and rolling little machine ready for customising.
And that's when my Vista Compatibility troubles started!
First, I installed the trusty AVG anti-virus. No problems there, fully compatible. Next, in went Open Office, Firefox, Thunderbird and various open source or freeware utilities - all of which installed without mishap. After all that, I wanted to take an image of the system to use as my base restore image. Out came True Image 9. Sorry, not compatible with Vista! Grrrr! I then ordered version 10 from Amazon, which will be installed as soon as it arrives. Next, I installed Visual Studio (I have two licenses). This needed a hefty update of gigantic proportions. Once downloaded and installed, in went SQL Server Express. Thankfully, after the updates, it all worked first time without any further tweaking.
What came next was the icing on the proverbial cake: my trusty U3 dongle is one Vista doesn't like. To get it to work, you have to disable the security on the dongle, after which it becomes an ordinary memory stick! Not good. Anyway, this provided the perfect excuse for me to splash out on a Corsair Flash VoyagerGT, 8 GIG version. This is a fabulous dongle - the fastest in the world! A few hours later, I had it fully loaded with my portable apps and documents and it was ready to go.
After some more minor tweaks, I now have an excellent little machine for general out of office work, perfectly adapted for web development.