Vista, Office and graphics cards

Having bought a nice 128MB 4x AGP graphics card for Mother for her Athlon 2400, 1GB etc computer, she OUGHT to have been ready for Vista. Rather annoyingly, her Windows XP Pro won't upgrade to Vista Home Premium despite the software being an upgrade so a clean install was what was on offer.

Actually the upgrade is quite sweet as it removes the Documents and Settings folder, the Program Files folder and the Windows folder and drops the lot into Windows.old folder for future use. The install went its usual way, clicking Next a lot really.

Gremlins and gotchas - Windows driver signing. If the driver is signed, install it. It might not work, but install it. The video card driver installs beautifully but a code 43 error means Vista disables it. Hours online gave a handful of workarounds but only one managed to get a driver to install but when you do a Windows Experience Index (Vista speak for 'How fast is my PC?'), we see our first BSOD from the nVidia mini display driver. Argh...

Printer? Sure - Vista hyperlink available on the manuf's site. Page then blank.

Lots of other software was not compatible but the new versions were downloaded and installed. Modem software isn't compatible either.

Office went in easily enough though.

Then came Windows Live Messenger. You'd think this one was simple wouldn't you? New Microsoft app onto new Microsoft OS. Surely they'd speak the same lingo? Installed, configured, won't connect. Problem traced, of all things, to the firmware revision of the hardware firewall (Netgear DG834G v2). If you DOWNgrade the firmware by a couple of steps it works. Cynically, I made no changes whatsoever to anything but the firmware and sure enough it works. So what is it that stops Live Messenger from connecting through the Netgear? Some kind of broadcast that looks like a packet level attack? But there is no outbound blocking, everything is allowed out.

Eventually it was all done and by 'all' I mean time. Early adopters beware - Vista can really wipe out your weekend.