Over the weekend, I finally removed the final piece of Windows XP installation remaining on my machine. I wiped out Windows XP partition, then booted using a Windows Vista Bootable DVD. Enter my product key for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, select which partition to install to, and that’s it. Two TV advertisements break later (about thirty minutes), the installation is done. Enter your user name, password, select wallpaper, time zone, and that’s more or less about it. Done. Can’t get simpler than that.
The first thing I checked was if all my hardware are installed correctly. All drivers, except two, are installed correctly. The two are my Linksys USB Wireless adapter (detected as Unknown Device) and Realtek built-in sound card in my motherboard (detected as Multimedia Sound Device). Since my wireless network couldn’t work, I plugged in my machine using LAN cable directly to my router, ran Windows Update, a total of 13 updates were found, including drivers for those two missing, along with some updated drivers for my video card and the latest Windows Mobile Device Center (ActiveSync replacement).
Done with that, the next destination is the Control Panel. I changed just a couple of things here:
- Indexing Options, change Selected Locations to include all drives I have.
- Keyboard properties, change repeat delay to the shortest. I like fast stuff
- Folder options, uncheck Hide extensions for known file types and check Use check boxes to select items (So I can use checkboxes instead of Ctrl+click click click to select multiple items in Explorer)
Soon after, it’s the installation time. Here are the stuffs I always install for my new machine.
- Adobe Flash Player 9 (no Flash, no YouTube :p)
- Windows Live Messenger 8.1
- Messenger Plus Live (must have add-on for Windows Live Messenger)
- IE7Pro (if you use IE7 in either XP/2003/Vista, this is a recommended add-on to have crash recovery, mouse gesture, undo close tab, etc. features, generally the features in Firefox that I miss in IE7. With this, I find myself use IE7 so much more than Firefox now)
- Flickr Uploadr (to upload photos to Flickr)
- Daemon Tools (to mount ISO files)
- Mozilla Firefox (even I use it much less now, but it’s still a must-have)
- MozBackup (restore my Firefox profile backup with ease. When it’s done, it gets uninstalled :p)
- Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 (custom install to choose only Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote)
- Winzip 11
- Adobe Reader 8
- Java SE Runtime Environment 6 – so I can use Internet Banking
- ATI Radeon Catalyst 7.1 Display Driver for Windows Vista
- K-Lite Mega Codec Pack v1.64
- Microsoft Money 2007 Home Edition
- BlogJet for blogging purposes
- ACDSee 9 Photo Manager, which took more than an hour to catalogue my 22,336 photos.
- Yahoo Messenger 8.1
- floAt’s Mobile Agent 2.1 (a must-have for Sony Ericsson’s phone user)
With these, my machine is now highly usable already 
Update: Windows Vista install part 2 tells more application that I installed after this.
[...] using my computer, the more I use it, the more stuffs gets installed to it, and continuing from the list of applications I installed last month, there are few more applications that found it’s way to my computer in the last month or so. [...]
Pingback by Windows Vista install part 2 « hendrikch.com — March 17, 2007 @ 1:38 pm