Going vista 64 on work laptop

[sourceninja]

My work laptop recently had a hard drive fail. I decided to put vista 64 on it (dell latitude d830). It is installing right now, and dell has drivers for it on their website, so that is not an issue. My biggest concern is software. If this fails I can always reimage with my old backup of xp. This will make a nice test to see how much of the software we use is ready for vista.

Software I need to do my job
1) java
2) crystal reports XI
3) Dreamweaver CS
4) Gimp
5) Office 2003
6) open office (personal use)
7) gaim
8) firefox, IE7, Opera, safari - testing purposes, I use firefox for normal browsing
9) aqua data studio - java, so if there is java, that should be fine
10) php - for debuging
11) ruby - same as php
13) python - same as php
14) cream/vim
15) tortiseSVN
16) novell client
17) putty

I think that covers it, any issues I should be on the look out for?

 

[Navid]

Don't you need VPN to connect to work from home?
Vista 64-bit VPN clients were not available yet last time I checked.

 

[VinDSL]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
My work laptop recently had a hard drive fail. I decided to put vista 64 on it ...

Heh!

Suicidal, are we?!?!? 😀

 

[compman25]

Vista 64 works great on my Dell XPS1330 laptop.

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: VinDSL

Originally posted by: sourceninja
My work laptop recently had a hard drive fail. I decided to put vista 64 on it ...

Heh!

Suicidal, are we?!?!? 😀

How is that suicidal? Seems about right, old computer dies so when buying a new one you put on the current OS instead of using something released many years ago.

 

[sourceninja]

Originally posted by: Navid
Don't you need VPN to connect to work from home?
Vista 64-bit VPN clients were not available yet last time I checked.

We use openvpn, which has a x64 release (checked that before deciding on 64 bit).

So far everything has been good. I have not tested the vpn yet. I will do that tonight. All my software appears to work. I had a problem with the novell client, but i switched from hostname to ip and it found the tree. I have an odd problem with firefox where it seems to think jinit.exe is not installed, but IE7 is working fine for that java application. So I'll stick to that (SCT banner).

 

[VinDSL]

Originally posted by: Crusty
How is that suicidal?

I don't know how it is where he works (he said it was a "work laptop") but...

Where I work, if you installed 64-bit Vista on one of their laptops you'd have some serious explaining to do - probably fire you... 😉

 

[sourceninja]

I control the direction of technology here at my work. I tell my boss I want to do something, he trusts I know enough to do it.

Now if I started installing vista on other peoples laptops....that might get me fired. But a large part of my job is staying bleeding edge to make sure we keep up with new technology. For a community college we are much more 'high tech' then our competitors. We always get comments about the quality of our hardware (3 year replacement cycles on all desktops/notebooks), the quality of our software (mostly in house development and open source software), and how easy everything seems to be ran.

5 years ago when I started, I had no say in anything, not even admin access on my own computers. Now there are very few systems running here that I have not either built, configured, designed, installed, coded, or consulted. One of my future projects on my wish list is actually removing my access to things for auditing purposes.

 

[VinDSL]

~Cool... Thanks for the detailed explanation! :thumbsup:

Well, since you got the hammer, the only question is...

Originally posted by: sourceninja
(A)ny issues I should be on the look out for? [going to Vista 64]

Sorry for the confusion! I thought you asking our permission... 😀

 

[sourceninja]

Well, the test was a failure. After getting all the drivers from Dell (and one from the manufacture) everything was working smooth and perfect. Even some co-workers were thinking of asking to switch. I decided to keep vista 64 and installed truecrypt and encrypted the entire drive. Again everything fine all day. Then today a snag happened. After 4 days of working suddenly this morning my computer could not get an ip address from the dhcp server. After several manual release and renews it finally got one, but now could not resolve any DNS. So I rebooted and it got an ip fine but would not allow me to ping anything outside of the local network. I did not have time to troubleshoot the problem, so I left and went to lunch, after returning from lunch I found the computer had blue screened. I rebooted it and everything came up except for the network. It simply would not get an IP. After about 15 minutes it blue screened again. This time the with a different blue screen error message. I rebooted again to investigate that message and it blue screened again with yet another error.

Frustrated, I dumped my backup image of xp on the drive. Everything is working perfectly. I think that truecrypt and one of the network card drivers was conflicting. It is company policy to have full disk encryption on all notebooks, and we do not have licenses for ultimate or enterprise, only business. This means that I have to use our standard which is truecrypt. If we had ultimate or enterprise I could of used bitlocker. However, we currently do not have plans to upgrade to that version. I have way too much work to do then to screw around with why this conflict is happening. I can only think it is truecrypt because that is the only change in my system in the last 4 days.

My xp is as rock solid as it ever was. I guess I'll stay here until our company decides to make an official switch company wide.

 

[Rebel44]

Originally posted by: sourceninja
Well, the test was a failure. After getting all the drivers from Dell (and one from the manufacture) everything was working smooth and perfect. Even some co-workers were thinking of asking to switch. I decided to keep vista 64 and installed truecrypt and encrypted the entire drive. Again everything fine all day. Then today a snag happened. After 4 days of working suddenly this morning my computer could not get an ip address from the dhcp server. After several manual release and renews it finally got one, but now could not resolve any DNS. So I rebooted and it got an ip fine but would not allow me to ping anything outside of the local network. I did not have time to troubleshoot the problem, so I left and went to lunch, after returning from lunch I found the computer had blue screened. I rebooted it and everything came up except for the network. It simply would not get an IP. After about 15 minutes it blue screened again. This time the with a different blue screen error message. I rebooted again to investigate that message and it blue screened again with yet another error.

Frustrated, I dumped my backup image of xp on the drive. Everything is working perfectly. I think that truecrypt and one of the network card drivers was conflicting. It is company policy to have full disk encryption on all notebooks, and we do not have licenses for ultimate or enterprise, only business. This means that I have to use our standard which is truecrypt. If we had ultimate or enterprise I could of used bitlocker. However, we currently do not have plans to upgrade to that version. I have way too much work to do then to screw around with why this conflict is happening. I can only think it is truecrypt because that is the only change in my system in the last 4 days.

My xp is as rock solid as it ever was. I guess I'll stay here until our company decides to make an official switch company wide.

3 weeks ago I had to reinstall my Vista 64bit because truecrypt damaged my OS 🙁