Installing some Windows XP security updates on Friday evening seemed to cause some major issue for Windows XP come Saturday afternoon when I tried to boot up my machine to upload some photos, from Fountains Abbey. You see as soon as it hit Windows in the boot sequence, it restarted itself. I tried it in safe mode, last good configuration mode, and a few other modes, nothing, every time a reboot. XP had died, long live Vista!

After whipping my HDD out of my machine I stuck it into my Ubuntu box, figured out how to mount the Windows partitions using this very handy page, and copied my data onto my external HDD.

I then started the job of repartitioning and formatting my HDD, and installing Vista, which I have to admit was made very painless by the Vista install. In fact, my whole experiance of Vista so far has been positive. I got it up and working in no time, all the apps I need are working, and it actually has some nice touches, like Media Center being included and a snazzy look and feel. The only downsides, I don't get the full on glass (Aero) snazzy look and feel because my graphics card is deemed not good enough, and IIS7.0 is confusing and doesn't work with .aspx and .asp file, but nothing that a bit of reading won't cure, I'm sure.

All in all I can't be happier with Vista, I'd recommend it!