When Windows reports that the installation has been complete, it usually is when things just start. Endless Windows updates from the Internet, chipset drivers, sound card drivers, network card drivers and most importantly the graphics card drivers need to be installed. These additional installations take much longer than the installation of Windows itself.

My first Windows 7 installation was on my desktop PC. While arguing with my wife on daily issues, I didn’t figure out when exactly I entered the product key.

When Windows 7 restarted the PC for the last time, I rushed to the Control Panel for the damage control.

There were no missing drivers!

Not only all system, graphics, audio and network drivers were installed, Windows 7 found and installed drivers for my Logitech Sphere webcam, USB Bluetooth transmitter and on-board Wi-Fi controller as well.

Updating through Internet took less than five minutes – granted, Windows 7 is still new but remember the retail version was fixed a couple of months ago.

Basically, everything except the Wi-Fi connected HP j6410 printer worked – Shame on HP! Their web site reported that 64 bit Win7 drivers would be ready in a couple of MONTHS!

Second in line was my Asus N90 laptop. Though I bought it recently, it came with Vista Home Premium with an upgrade option to Windows 7 Home Premium.

As I run a small domain at home, home versions are no good for me. The upgrade path would have been to pay for shipping to get an upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium and pay to use Anytime Upgrade to move on to Windows 7 Professional. I decided to start from scratch with a clean Windows 7 Professional installation.

Disk in, started to boot and good god, the installer detected wireless networks and asked me the WEP key to connect and download updated installation files. Amazingly enough, it did work when I entered the key!

A very long way from the “Insert a floppy disk with drivers to drive A: and press a key when ready” prompt, isn’t it? And I am talking about XP, not Windows 3.11.

Needless to say, the Asus driver CD is still in its sealed envelope. No devices were missing after the installation. NVIDIA drivers came through Windows Update though.

So far, both machines have been working without any crashes or any other hardware issues. It’s been over three days. I haven’t had any software compatibility issues either. MS-Office, Adobe reader, Flash Player and all other essentials are running just fine. Media Player Classic with its 64 bit Home Cinema version is happily playing all H.264 movies and most importantly World of Warcraft is back in life.

A very big credit goes to Microsoft. Never been easier.

Allow me to elaborate.

Vista in marketing terms was a miserable failure.

Vista was released prematurely without proper driver support. Even simple printers, onboard sound cards or webcams didn’t work. Hardware requirements were artificially increased to help new PC sales which made the Vista upgrade very expensive for home users.

Because Vista was rushed, many features which would be visible to end-users were stripped off, the most unfortunate being the Windows (Longhorn) file system. This made Vista only a slightly better-looking XP, without anything more to offer.

On the corporate business side, things were much worse. Poor networking performance left corporate IT departments no choice but continue with XP/Server 2003. Spending a lot of money to upgrade user PC’s to run Vista for lower overall performance wouldn’t be the smartest thing to do.

Shortly, nobody had any compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista.

On top of all these the competition put the final nail in Vista’s coffin. Macs with OS-X stepped in at an unusually reasonable price tag for Apple and combined with Vista’s negative publicity, suddenly they began to sell more.

Vista's name couldn't be saved by making it better with service packs and hotfixes. A replacement was needed.

Interestingly enough, Vista's replacement was nothing else but Vista itself, only in a new package.

Vista was already and partly had become a very good system. It just had to be reverse engineered to drop its artificial marketing load. A reasonable memory usage, faster networking, faster boot times, less annoying UAC and XP compatibility for small businesses. Thanks to Vista, driver support was already in place. Again thanks to the Vista flop, developers had enough time to release betas to public and fix compatibility problems without much pressure from Marketing to launch the product.

In essence, all that techies had to do in addition was to write an improved task bar.

And they all enjoyed the easy and guaranteed success. Whatever they did couldn’t be worse than Vista at its launch anyway.

All Hail Windows 7!

Short Answer… No.

Today, Vista is a capable and visually attractive operating system bundled with a lot of useful features for an easy and efficient user experience.

Then, Why the Doom Talk?

Most of the criticism had a lot of merit when Vista was initially launched.

Timing of Vista’s release was the biggest problem. Actually, Vista today is what it was supposed to be two years ago. Microsoft simply released Vista when it was not ready for release. Though Vista was not in an extremely bad shape at the Launch date, hardware manufacturers were not ready with their drivers. Drivers either didn’t exist or had been insufficiently tested and optimized. When I installed Vista for the first time, it failed to recognize the most common Logitech webcam which I had for years. I had problems with the onboard sound even though Vista recognized the motherboard and installed the drivers. There is nothing more frustrating for a user to lose what he had before an upgrade which is supposed to improve his experience.

Another important reason for user-discontent was the success of the competition and I am not talking about Apple here. I am referring to the competition within Microsoft, which was the robust, mature and competent Windows XP. With vista, Microsoft’s challenge was to please a community who were extremely satisfied with XP. Obviously, it didn’t work well. Many people including myself reinstalled XP after the first Vista attempt.

Vista was very slow compared to XP. Boot time was longer while Microsoft tried to make us believe otherwise. Even though Vista displayed the desktop sooner than or at about the same time with XP, it took much longer to start being able to do anything useful with the computer. Poor hard disk kept spinning endlessly, and then the gadgets appeared. More spinning and system tray icons appeared after the other in slow motion. A file copy which is one of the most basic tasks of an operating system took forever to complete.

The final blow to Vista was the User Access Control (UAC) concept which indiscriminately annoyed every single user. The screen dimmed during most common tasks and users were asked to approve certain tasks in the name of security but without almost any practical consequence other than making users doubt themselves, feel more insecure and lose more time.

Despite genuine complaints, the “I don’t like Microsoft” syndrome contributed to overall unhappiness substantially. This group of people, mostly insufficiently knowledgeable Apple missionaries, used Microsoft’s Vista failure to bash Microsoft and Windows relentlessly. After this massive propaganda, many believed that if they installed Vista, they would no longer be able to boot their PC’s.

Today’s Vista

Vista even when it was released two years ago introduced quite a few new or improved features, to name a few, gadgets, new and extremely useful sidebars and navigation tools for the Windows Explorer, an improved and properly organized control panel, much more user-friendly networking controls and an extremely good looking user interface. On the technical side, Vista provided better utilization of multiple-core processors, new and more secure driver infrastructure, DirectX 10 and genuine 64-bit support.

The most serious problem of missing or inefficient drivers has been solved in time when hardware manufacturers released new drivers for Vista. Today, Vista is equally or more hardware-compatible than XP.

Slow boot or file copy times haven’t been entirely solved, however, after Service Pack 1, the speed has improved – or I feel that way because simply I got used to it.

The competition with XP is almost won. Microsoft focused their efforts on Vista Development and consequently stopped XP improvements aside from security. Vista caught up with XP and overtook it in many areas, particularly with its x-64 support. Except Vista’s higher hardware requirements, I don’t see a reason why one would go back to XP today.

UAC? ...Sorry. Still there.

As for the anti-Microsoft or anti-Windows lobby, I believe talk will always be around and Mac lovers will use Vista’s drawbacks as an argument to convince simple PC users to switch to Mac. Microsoft will still be accused of copying or stealing from Apple or if Microsoft does not adopt a Mac feature, they will be criticized for not having it (No misunderstandings here, I am not a Microsoft fan. I am planning to buy a Mac myself for different reasons though).

And yes, finally, I recommend Vista to anyone who already has XP or plans to buy a new computer.

Why build a home network?

Networking means connectivity. By setting up a network, one can connect multiple IT equipment such as personal computers, printers, scanners, mobile phones, game consoles and even devices such as TV’s and share their resources.

There are many reasons why one would put together a small home network of which the most common is to share an internet connection with multiple PC’s at home. Quite often people use a network with a wireless connection to avoid cable clutter even if there is only one PC at home.

The first apparent benefit of having a home network is the ability of sharing content on various PC’s at home. Family members can share pictures, multimedia content such as music files, video files, documents, etc. By going one step further and dedicating a (potentially old) PC to content sharing, all previously mentioned content can be stored and accessed centrally.

Sharing computer peripherals is another common reason to have a home network. One printer and/or scanner can be used by multiple PC’s.

Recent mobile phones such as iPhone and game consoles such as Soy PS3 or Microsoft XBOX can make use of an internet connection for basic surfing, software or firmware updates, multiple user gaming and other services that exist on the internet. Game consoles can also play music and video stored elsewhere on the network. Phone devices that work through the internet (VOIP) also require an internet connection to function.

And finally, if you enjoy working with computers, setting up a network is a lot of fun.

And How?

Without going too much into technicality, you need a central point of connection to which all devices on the network are connected as in today’s basic way of networking you cannot connect one device to another. These connections might be wired or wireless or a combination of both. A wired connection point is called a switch and a wireless connection point is called an access point. You can extend your network by adding more switches and access points as needed in the future.

Second basic component is called a router and again without getting into too much technicality, it connects your home network to the Internet thus shares your internet connection.

Finally you need a modem which handles the physical connection with your internet service provider. This connection is typically through phone lines (ADSL) or through the cable TV connection.

Luckily, you can buy one box in which you have all the above functionalities. Go for a wireless 802.11n modem/router with four gigabyte switching ports which will cost around $100. Follow manufacturer’s instruction and set it up.

Set up your laptop’s wireless connection to connect to your new wireless network. If your desktop PC is in close proximity to the router/switch box, use a network cable to connect the PC to one of the available switch ports. Otherwise buy a wireless network card for the desktop PC and configure it to use the wireless network.

Connect your printer to a PC or directly to the router/switch if your printer supports it and share it over the network. Now you can print from any PC at home.

Go to your mobile phone’s wi-fi settings and configure it to use your wireless network by following instructions. You may have to use the CD/DVD provided by your phone’s manufacturer for its configuration. Repeat the same with your gaming console.

Put a few hard drives in an old PC, use external USB drives if you don’t like to use a screwdriver. Make sure that the PC has connected to the switch with a network cable or it has a wireless network card to connect to your wireless network. Make a new folder on the new hard drive and share it on Windows by giving read only access to everyone. Move all your music and video files here. Now you can play all your favorite songs and movies on your laptop in the garden, in the bathroom or even in your bedroom. Using your gaming console, both music and videos can be played on your TV or stereo.

Finally get yourself a Skype (or your favorite VOIP) compatible box which can be plugged directly to a router. Set it up by following the instructions. Now your calls are much cheaper or even free.

If you need more shared storage space, a NAS box which contain hard drives inside and which can be connected to the network directly without a PC might be very practical. If you run out of wired switch ports, you can buy another switch and connect it to the first one.

Once you have the basics, you will find many different ways of utilizing your network. For the moment, if you liked the idea, make sure you do some more reading on network basics before you start buying things. Although setting up a network is not difficult, it is not as easy as it sounds above.