Windows Vista upgrade this weekend!

Yesterday I ordered Windows Vista Ultimate and a 500GB SATA2 hard drive from NewEgg.com so I can finally upgrade my system to Windows Vista. I’ve been running the beta 2 version of this new OS for a while now and I’ve been very impressed with it for a number of reasons:

• The Aero Glass interface is really slick and is a much needed “eye candy” update for Windows. On top of that, as long as you have an even halfway decent video card it works with little to no overhead (for instance, I’m running on my work laptop with has a 64mb ATI card in it).
• The new layout of Windows in general has been improved. For some people this seems to be problem since they “can’t find anything” but I believe myself to be a fairly intelligent guy and I had no problem with this. I think many of these claims are just incompetent people blaming the software for their learning issues.
• It seems much more fault tolerate than XP overall. While I have had one system crash during my run with the beta, it seems that this OS is much more stable and can handle a failed app without taking down the whole system (something touted but never really realized in XP).
• The new image based install system is much faster than the previous install system in XP. On top of that, it allows for much more automated install that I can just kick off and go get dinner. I like not having to babysit the install for 90 mins.

So given all that I decided to bit the bullet and move ahead with the change to Vista. As an aside… in case you’re wondering why I “had” buy the hard drive by the way, the copy of Vista that I bought was an OEM copy so it has to be installed on a clean hard drive. Also, I’m tired of having to constantly move movies and whatnot around on my smaller 160GB hard drive that I have now as my main drive so this will allow me plenty of storage space for everything and anything I want to watch via Media Center. Anyway, both items should be arriving on my doorstep tomorrow (gotta love that fast shipping at Newegg!) and I’ll be spending the better part of my Sunday working on the upgrade since my wife will be out of town doing her kayaking thing (not actually kayaking of course since it’s winter but she’s running the booth for her kayaking club at a local outdoor sports show). I’m really looking forward to this (yeah, I’m a HUGE geek) so I’ll be sure to post up my experiences with the install and initial setup as soon as I’m done!