Improve your work life balance with Vista

Up until today I wasn't convinced, but when the shrink-wrapped version of Vista Ultimate finally dropped though the letterbox, all that changed.

I'd been running Vista RC1 since the back end of last year and, despite the uninspiring choice of hardware I was using, it seemed to perform pretty well. So it was with eager anticipation that I placed the DVD in the machine, a 2.4GHz Northwood Pentium 4 with 512Mb of PC800 RDRAM and 160Gb of disk storage. Hardly state of the art, but still significantly better than the minimum requirement listed on the Vista box. Obviously, using an ancient TNT2 graphics card with a meagre 64Mb of memory, the full Aero experience would have to wait until another day.

What I hadn't expected was the immediate improvement in the time I had available to do all those pesky household chores I'd been putting off for ages. It was 1000 this morning when I clicked on the 'upgrade' button and typed in the product key. Remember this is an upgrade install we're talking about, and an upgrade from Vista build 5600 to build 6000 at that. The original clean install of RC1 I did on the same box took about 45 minutes. To upgrade it to the full retail product took over three hours.

Let me reiterate that this machine isn't the fastest in the world, but how on Earth can it take more than three times as long to upgrade a product than to install it in the first place? The good news is that I finally decided to vacuum the house. Check the PC, no, still installing. I know, I'll mow the lawn. Install at 45%. Car needs a wash. Install now at 60%. Need a couple of bottles of wine. Pop to supermarket. Install hits 80%. Ah well, time for a pint. Off to the pub. Two pints later and the machine's sitting at the 'Do you want to install these 10 updates?' screen. Why yes, I do. Pour a glass of wine and wait.

And so, at 1330, my upgrade was finally complete. In Vista's favour, everything appears to be running fine and a tad faster than the pre-release version, apart from all the programs I had in the Quick Launch bar having vanished and the very irritating User Account Control having been switched on again without asking me. But three and a half hours to upgrade from a slightly earlier version of Vista is just rubbish.

Next week, I should receive a far more powerful machine to evaluate - Core duo CPU, a few Gigs of DDR2 RAM, state of the art graphics, Serial ATA etc etc. This machine is the one I really want to try Vista on. Hopefully it will install a tad faster, but if it doesn't, there's always some decorating I could be getting on with while I wait. [Why aren't you down the pub? Sounds like Vista eats into valuable drinking time. Ed.] ?