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My gorgeous HP laptop shipped with Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit. For the most part, I'm pretty happy with this - VIsta 64-bit is very stable, pretty fast, and properly supported by the vendor. There is a little problem, though, and I want to share it.

THERE'S NO FUCKING FULL-SYSTEM BACKUP FEATURE ON VISTA HOME PREMIUM.

Let me run that by you again:

THERE'S ...

Ok, enough. My point, even though this is my blog that hardly anyone reads so I don't actually need a point and anyway so what, is that it is criminally stupid to ship an OS without a proper backup program. Every (NT-based) version of Windows before Vista shipped with a basic but entirely competent backup system.

Vista Business has a full-system backup, but Vista Home Premium does not. This is odd; for a business user, the chances are that (a) you have a standard OS image that someone else manages, and (b) you would be a fucking idiot to have data you need only on the laptop. [The world isn't short of idiots, of course, so that kind of data loss happens all the time.] On a home PC, you'd have none of that; further, you're unlikely to have someone competent enough to reinstall for you. It's completely the wrong way round - home users have more need for a full backup than business users.

So now I have to buy something to do a job XP could do perfectly well for itself. Let's see how that goes.

The most blatant case of game art plagiarism ever? (GamesRadar link.)

My first working day with Vista Ultimate 64-bit went very well. No problems at all, in fact. VMware performed like a champ. Skype was perfect, at least as good as on XP. iTunes (64-bit native, no less!) is great, I even managed to import my old iTunes library intact.

It's working so well I'm already resolved to keep it on my main PC. I ordered 4GB of RAM today to add to the 2G that's already in here. Why? Because I can! No PAE crap - just 6GB of fully-addressable main memory. Check it aat!

Ok, so most of my processes are 32-bit and can't access 4GB. I don't care. As long as I can have a 3GB disk cache along with all my processes and VMs in RAM, your petty sniping observations are irrelevant, you hear? Irrelevant!

I don't know what all the people on the 'net are trying to do with Vista, but I had a really positive experience today. The installation woes are almost forgotten, because now it's working extremely well. I'm a happy bunny.

Vista is installed, patched, and replete with the applications I need to do my job.

After a torrid time with the early install, where everything took far too long and nothing was where it ought to be, it settled down. The new interface is nice with all the eye candy switched on (after I reevaluated my 'experience index' with all the drivers installed).

To my amazement, all my apps seem to work just fine. There appear to be drivers for pretty much everything. Yes, my Vista 64-bit system is up and running, working very well indeed thanks very much.

VMware Workstation installed first time, no problems. BioShock - fine (and looks great with its DirectX 10 features). Firefox - great. Thunderbird - fine. Steam - fine, although there seem to be some odd quirks within the Half-Life 2 engined-games with respect to available screen resolutions.

In short, it's not too bad once you get over the hump. I can be effective with this PC now; and considering how unlikely that looked at 10pm last night, that's a pretty decent result.

I've decided to take the plunge and try Windows Vista for myself, on my very own prime-time desktop PC. It has to work; I work from home, it contains my office PC as well, albeit safely hidden away in a VMWare virtual machine.

I bought a Vista Ultimate upgrade. I was never going to be happy with anything less. I'm like that.

I decided I'd skip an upgrade and do a fresh install. Turns out that was a wise choice - you can't upgrade from 32-bit XP to 64-bit Vista. So: Backup; verify backup; worry; reboot; worry; format; fret for a while.

After an extraordinarily long time, it appeared to finish installing. Then it rebooted and hung with a blinking text-mode cursor. Not good. After waiting a good long time, I hit the reset button where it promptly did it again. Or so it appeared; after a few seconds it rebooted into Vista.