Back in March, seven months ago, I wrote that I was putting Vista onto my home PC. Today I reinstalled XP instead. The main reason for doing this is that there is no reasonable upgrade path to Windows 7 for these old Intel 915 boards, and that is because there is no Vista driver produced by Intel for them. The result is they can only use the built in display driver on Windows 7, and that one won’t work with DirectX. Now it is true I could put a new graphics card into this box and get Windows 7 drivers on it, but it is still going to be an old slow heap. So I decided it will have XP on it until I upgrade. XP went on today after the usual major prep work, made a lot easier by having three HDDs, and I’m already enjoying the superior speed and stability.
Windows 7 RC at work, incidentally, seems to have a major stability problem whenever I try to open the Documents folder (Library) into the old My Documents area, instead of all my files it just hangs. After you crash out of the app and try to open again, it works the second time. Roll on SP1.
