Now that I had most of my "legacy" applications running under Win Vista, it was time to turn my attention to the drivers.  The only drivers that were installed to date were those that came with the system, which included drivers for an HP F4280 multipurpose printer.  I had two older printers (an HP 952C and an Epson CX3810) that I needed to find 64-bit drivers for.  So off I went to hp.com and epson.com respectively and found 64-bit drivers for both.  I installed the drivers and both printers were now up an running under Win Vista 64-bit.

The HP PC came equipped with a multipurpose flash memory card reader, so all my various compact flash and SD cards made an effortless transition.  The only remaining device I needed a new driver for was my webcam, which was about three years old.  I didn't expect to find a driver and my expectations were met!  It's been my experience that the webcam vendors rarely bother to provide drivers for operating systems other than the ones that were in existance when the device came on the market.  But all's well anyway, as the webcam remains up and running just fine on the old Win XP desktop.

And so far, other than the webcam, every device I've connected to the USB ports have worked as expected, including my USB-attached hard drive.

That left me with one more application to get running.  I use the Menalto Gallery on my web site.  For batch uploading of images, I had been using Gallery Remote.  Although everything I had read said that Gallery Remote was not compatible with Win Vista, I figured there was nothing to lose by giving it a shot.  As it turned out, there are indeed some problems with it, but the basic file uploading works.  There are problems with local image resizing and a few other nits, but all I ever used Gallery Remote for was batch uploading, so it satisfied my needs.

In conclusion, I've found Win Vista Ultimate 64-bit with Service Pack 1 to be quite stable.  I've had it running 24 x 7 for over a month now with no crashes and all my legacy applications are running just fine.  Is it perfect?  No.  Are there things I do not like about it?  Of course.  But the same can be said for all the operating systems I've used over the years.

In Part I, I had just taken delivery of my new desktop loaded with Windows Vista Home Premium with Service Patch 1 (SP1).  Once I got all the cabling done, it was time to turn the power on and let Vista do its thing.  Vista Home Premium ran through its initial setup and did a reboot with no problems incurred along the way.  I then installed the upgrade to Vista Ultimate, connected to the Internet and downloaded and installed the latest updates from the Microsoft.  Now it was time to find out just how many of my "legacy" applications would indeed run in a Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit environment.

I was planning on buying a new PC for a while now.  As I thought about just what hardware and software configuration I wanted, it occurred to me that there was one important decision that I had to make.  The decision wasn't about the PC hardware as this stuff is pretty much commoditized these days.  Rather it was regarding the operating system.  I'm well-versed in both Windows and Linux, but truth be told, most of the applications and tools I use on a day-to-day basis are Windows-centric.  I'm still not convinced that Linux is ready for prime time as my desktop operating environment.

That left me with the choice of continuing on with Win XP or finally dealing with Win Vista.  In the past I had been an "early adopter" of the various incarnations of Windows through the years, starting with the first semi-decent release (Win 95) way back when.  But I was really hesitant to migrate to Vista.  It wasn't due to all the negative press and Vista bashing on forums and blogs.  Those of us who have been around for a while heard many of the same complaints about Win XP.