Vista’s new install

With rumers flying through the net of Vista SP1 getting it’s final public release, I’ve decided today is a good day (for vista) to die.

Judging by responses on Internet forums, I find that people’s experience with Windows Vista are nearly as polorised to a level almost exceeding a jar of marmite. I have to say I have a love-hate relationship with it. I really appreciate the included features of Aero, Media Centre and an enhanced Explorer, I’ve also noticed better printer support and networking. Unfortunately this installation of Vista, on my computer, is extremely unstable! Media Center is a hopeless loss, Explorer freezes randomly, I get .dll crashes occurring and file transfers are rubbish.

Windows Vista is reasonably easy to reinstall, all you have to do is select ‘Boot from CD/DVD‘ in the BIOS, pop in the Vista DVD and hit restart. During the installation windows will ask if you want to reformat the drive. This deletes all your files but you end up with a fresh clean install of Vista taking up just 10GB.

In a hope that with Vista installed on a freshly formatted drive I can get SP1 to install cleanly. The only downside is that I have to reinstall all my programs and reconfigure my settings. First I made a backup of everything in my C:/users folder. Then after Vista installation I install all my programs then drag my back-up settings back onto c:/. Finally I clean-up the settings (including hacking the registry) and delete unneeded installation files. To help me in my redowload marathon I made a list of all the programs I use; some of them may be of interest to you. Later I also go through the steps and guides I used to hack the registry and get Vista just the way I like it.

First things, first. Turn off the F***ing user account control!

Diagnostics and System:

  • Drivers
    • LAN driver/ Graphics/ Monitor/ TV Card/ Printer <- Windows installs the rest, however, updating drivers in Device manager is a pile of useless.
    • Firefox <-The first, last and only time I use I.E.7 is to get firefox!
  • Diagnostics


Core:

  • Security
    • Antivirus, whatever be your favourite retroviral drugs. I use AVG
    • Adaware
  • Powertoys
    • 7 Zip <- I hate Vista’s native .zip support, it’s slower than xp! Also less bloater and more free than WinRarrrrrr.
    • VSO Image Resizer <- Easy batch image resizing
    • Synctoy <- Sync folders between laptop and PC automatically.
    • Shadow Explorer <- Recover ‘deleted’ files
    • Gmail Drive <- Store files in your account as if it was a hard drive
    • Deepburner <- Your more reliable than windows DVD burner. (Don’t even think of installing bloatware like Nero!)
    • Spacemonger <- keep track of free filespace
  • Productivity
    • Ms Office
    • GIMP for windows <-although Photoshop continues to be the industry standard, open source GIMP is seriously comparable and best of all, completely free!
    • Photoshop elements
    • Snagit <- I’ve been using snag it for years, although it has some early troubles with graphics overlay, it currently takes screenshots flawlessly.
    • Foxit <- Able to edit PDF with comments and far faster than Adobe’s PDF reader.
    • Copernic Desktop Search 2.0 <- Because Vista search isn’t as good.


Internet:


Multimedia:

  • Players (For all your anime viewing needs)
    • VLC player
    • K-lite codecs
    • BBC iPlayer
    • Winamp 5.33
    • Windows media player 11
  • Windows Media Center (See Also: The green button list)
    • .Mkv and .Ogg Hack <- registry edits to get these files to show up and play from the browser (Warning! Sometimes crashes windows media center, makes previews fail to display).
    • TV tonic add on <- Adds more online channels to the slim number availiable by default.
  • Direct x 10.1


At this point Vista SP1 was availiable as a direct 435mb download, so I went for it. 35 minutes to download the whole thing. I did get top speed though. Microsoft have crazy amounts of bandwidth.

Tweaks and Hacks:

  • System configuration
    • Steamling the programs -> (Startmenu/msconfig) I removed all the programs I don’t want at startup. Startup was quite sparse of programs and only needed trimming but services was chokka so took a bit of time to prune. I used this site to help identify which services I wanted, it also has a list of recommended tweaked settings but I only followed 1/4 of that list.
    • Vista Gadgets -> Weatherbug,  AppLauncher, UK Radio, Multimeter.
    • Configure Email -> Register Accounts, Reprogram the filters, Delete the MSN RSS feeds (10 mins, not bad!).
    • Configure the computer to enter C1 and C3 state -> Native Vista support for sleep and hibernate is terrible, even in Vista SP1. This process requires disabling all the ‘Allow this device to wake the computer’ checkboxes. It took ages to nail the device that was preventing the system from sleeping :(.
    • Right Click Context Menu -> Registry hack to get rid of some of the useless programs which slow down and clutter the interface when I right-click a file. The ones I wanted were mostly at: HKCR\Directory\ShellEx\ContextMenuHandlers\ and yes I did make a backup.

Total time taken: 3 days / 18 hours (35 Programs installed, not including drivers.)

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