Thu, Jul 28 2005 1:37 PM
Erwyn van der Meer
Installation experience with Window Vista
This is my first post from within Internet Explorer 7.0 running on Windows Vista. It is my account of the installation process of Windows Vista.
10:16 - Finished burning the 2.4 GB ISO image to DVD. Windows XP Autoplay offered to start the setup.exe on the new DVD.
10:17 - Started the installation from within Windows XP. I only had to answer three questions: 1) Where to install, 2) The product key and 3) The computer name.
10:18 - Windows Vista started installing from within Windows XP. No further user interaction was needed. I took this picture:

10:25 - First reboot. My Windows XP installation takes two minutes to shut down ;(
10:27 - First Windows Vista boot. The boot screen looks nasty:

10:28 - The installation continued. The following screen was shown for quite some time. Note that the progress bar didn't make any sense. It filled and cleared about once every minute.

10:48 - Second reboot. Same boot screen, but then followed by a black screen, followed by my monitor going into stand-by. Hmmm, not good I thought. Then I remembered something similar when installing an alpha build of Longhorn. I turned on my secondary monitor, and fortunately the installation was continuing over there:

10:51 - The installation is complete. Windows Vista is running interactively and I can switch the display back to my primary monitor.
So all in all a good setup experience. The process is much smoother than installing Windows XP for instance. Subtracting the two reboot time, installing Windows Vista took 32 minutes with only minor user interaction at the start required. On to my first explorations within Windows Vista in my next blog post...
Filed under: Windows Vista