The ScooterBlog

My last post, I had promised that my Tablet PC would get the Windows Vista treatment, and it did. But there were definite peaks and valley’s in the process.

The first attempt was seemingly a smart idea … upgrade the XP Tablet PC edition to Vista Business. In a word, it was a complete unmitigated disaster. Programs didn’t work, updates that should have taken moments took forever, and it worked horribly. Since this computer is two years old (plus), and crashed early and often. It took one night of toiling with it horribly to realize that this wasn’t the way to go.

So, after backing up anything worth keeping, the new task was to build the Vista system from scratch. In the beginning, it worked perfectly, loaded almost all of the needed drivers and worked great, and then, loading one driver from Windows XP caused the entire installation to blue screen out, even in Safe Mode! A thankful “System Restore” from the installation disc (impressed with how well it worked) though got the system back and running, and after the discovery that Toshiba had posted a TON of good Windows Vista drivers in the last couple of days, the experience since then has been absolutely perfect, better and faster then Windows XP was believe it or not. Toshiba gets some serious props in their Windows Vista driver support.
Having Vista-ready apps like Office and OneNote 2007 doesn’t hurt either, as OneNote is a program I’m anxious to delve into with this being a Tablet-style box.

Over this weekend while I’m in Cincinnati, I anticipate posting a lot of information about how I got this build up and running on this particular PC, as well as tethering my 8125 (Stephen, you’ll like this part!) to my laptop to use it as a EDGE modem anywhere, including the near-impossible to find Vista drivers.