All of our research into Vista adoption has resulted in one overriding message from literally thousands of IT professionals we have gathered intelligence from - WAIT UNTIL IT SETTLES DOWN!

But did I listen? No.

I was driving through our little town on the south coast of England on Saturday and as I passed our local PC dealer, I saw a sign pronouncing that Vista had arrived, so I thought I would pop in and see how much interest the guys there were picking up. Interestingly, they told me that Vista is the best selling OS upgrade they have ever had in—lot's more people asking for it (and actually buying it) than were interested in Windows XP upgrades when they became available. They also said that while they had helped people with a few driver issues, it wasn't causing the havoc they had expected, and feedback from early customers (mostly consumers) was positive.

One dealer is hardly a significant sample, but I was nevertheless encouraged, so decided to give it a whirl.

Now, any sensible person would have chosen to install Vista for the first time on a secondary machine, but in the interests of "real world" research, I thought I would just go for it and put it onto my notebook. This is a Sony Vaio VGN-SZ1XP/C—not the latest of machines, but with a 1.83Gz dual core CPU, 2Gb of memory, and decent NVIDIA graphics card, was well over the minimum Vista spec.

So what happened?

Well, it was quite an adventure that is still, in fact, ongoing, but here is the story so far.

To begin with, the Vista Upgrade Advisor told me that the hardware spec was fine (as expected) and up to running both Vista and the Aero user interface. It instructed me, however, to remove two applications before installing—Kaspersky AV and some Symantec service module that I could find no trace of in Add/Remove Programs. I was comfortable with removing Kaspersky and installing the latest Vista compatible version as the vendor website was pretty clear on what was required and the fact that I would ultimately be supported. Given that I have never installed a Symantec product on the machine, and immediately deleted the bundled Norton AV when I first bought it, however, I have to say I was a little annoyed (not for the first time) to find that a Symantec product had "infected" my PC with no obvious way of getting rid of it. The Microsoft and Symantec Websites were not very helpful, but fortunately, the local dealer pointed me in the direction of the Norton Removal Tool. This found and deleted the offending component so I could continue.

I was also warned by the Upgrade Advisor that a dozen or so other applications may experience minor compatibility issues, but I bit the bullet and went for it. The install then cranked away for a couple of hours and eventually completed—time consuming but pretty uneventful.

Then the real fun began. Downloading and installing the new version of Kaspersky was no problem at all—I did that first lest I forgot. But I still had a misbehaving display (misaligned fonts is the best way I can describe it), various messages popping up with warnings of danger and incompatibility that needed investigating and working through, a mouse pad not operating as it should, and none of the function keys combinations for volume, brightness, etc working at all. By far the biggest challenge in the whole process was then figuring out what to do about locating and updating all of the proprietary Sony drivers and utilities to fix this stuff. It would be nice to think that you could go to the Sony site and find a nice little upgrade package, but no—it's all there, but you have to download about 12–15 components individually, all in setup files with incomprehensible names, then install them in the right order. I have to say that for a "premium" product, the unhelpful way Sony has organised the download area of Vaio support website and the general lack of guidance on upgrading is very disappointing.

Anyway, after an hour and a half of messing around, all of the relevant Sony drivers and utilities were installed and most things seemed to work fine in terms of the basic operation of the machine.

At the time of writing (Sunday evening), the machine still isn't 100% right, but it's usable. There are a couple of start-up applications that Vista insists on blocking and for some reason, it is asking my permission three times during the boot process before running the mouse pad driver and utility. I'll work through these over the next day or so, which will provide a good first hand opportunity to investigate how some of the new security features really work in practice.

The one thing I haven't mentioned is whether there is anything really serious that doesn't work. Well Acrobat 6 is one of them (just doesn't work at all) so I guess the choice now is whether I can justify what looks like an expensive upgrade. For the time being, I have installed a free Vista compatible PDF creation utility which does about 98% of what ever used Acrobat for, so I may not bother. The one killer, though, is that our service provider, Vodafone, doesn't currently support Vista for any form of cellular connectivity. After a couple of calls, I was able to establish that a software upgrade is planned for the USB HSDPA modem I use later this month, but it was all a bit vague in terms of commitment. I thought of re-instating an O2 3G card I have sitting in the drawer here, but a call to O2 confirmed that they don't support Vista at the moment either.

So, it's been an interesting experience up to this point, and as the whole objective was to learn, it has been very worthwhile from a research perspective—I am a firm believer that you only really get under the skin of new technology if you try it for real rather than investigating in a laboratory fashion. If the aim was immediate productivity gain and/or experiencing the Wow factor, however, it has so far been a dismal failure. But, let's be realistic, it is very early days and I embarked on the adventure fully expecting the challenges to emerge. Having said this, I am hopeful that the niggles will settle down over the next week or two, Vodafone will get me connected again, and I'll be fully back to 100% functionality again.

In the meantime, I'll start trying out the new features of the updated OS as I go about my daily business, which again, is probably the most effective way to find out what really matters in the real world from a usability and productivity perspective.

Look out for more posts from bleeding edge as I go.

(PS: Just went to print this so I could read it through before posting and found the printer driver doesn't work—something else to add to the list!).