When we last left our fateful hero (moi) and Vista this is where we were…
I’m on the fence. I’ve told some friends, and now all of you, that I have an OEM copy of Vista for Business (64 bit) available to buy. I’m hoping, actually, that someone will leap up and want it (I’m only selling to recover costs and it will cost you less than even the Vista Business upgrade price) so I won’t be tempted to try it again.
Bottom line on my advice … if you have a 64 bit machine, be very, very cautious about switching to Vista 64 bit (I don’t know if 32 would have been okay for me). For machines with Conexant-powered sound it looks like the drivers just aren’t there for you right now.
Source: Pimp Your Work – My Vista saga, part 3 the finale–or is it?
Now what kind of geek would I be if I just left it at that huh? Yeah, exactly. I spend a lot of yesterday just kicking myself about this. I was frustrated that I couldn’t get it to work. Pissed that I was stuck with XP. I toyed with the idea of trying Ubuntu, but realized that I really like a lot of my Windows apps. Then it hit me. What I should have done all a long—install Vista on a separate partition and do a dual-boot thing.
So I did. As luck would have it, I downloaded an Ubuntu DVD that let me boot from DVD and it had the GNU partitioning tool that let’s you edit partitions non-destructively (this is important since I spent a couple days getting my machine back up to snuff). I split my main partition in half (so about 50 gigs for each), and did the whole Vista install thing on the new partition.
Vista doesn’t actually mind being installed like this. It’s almost like MSFT figured it wasn’t really ready for primetime and we might not want to just go whole hog for Vista.
Well anyway I played with Vista for several hours last night. I still haven’t had success with the sound problem, but I realized in them middle of the night that I hadn’t turned off UAC (User Access Controls) … this is key to making anything relatively non-standard work under Vista, it seems.
So here’s where we’re at. Vista runs. I do like the UI. I have all my files accessable under Vista and XP (I’ll focus on the XP partition if I do any “real” work on the Vista side).
I’ll keep you posted on the search for signed 64 bit drivers for Conexant AC-Link audio.
[...] When we last left off, I’d set up a dual-boot partition for XP and Windows Vista. It went pretty well, I was able to use both XP and Vista. But no matter how hard I tried and using all the tips and tricks I found, I still couldn’t get the audio to work in the 64 bit version. So I had a thought, maybe the 32 bit version would work better? Now I was very lucky that the Vista fairies left the copy of 32 bit Vista for Business on my computer so I could give the shot. [...]
Reply