Jim Allchin, now former Co-President of Platforms & Services Division has left Microsoft for a fresh new life after he has delivered the latest Windows Vista to the public. His quote on Windows Vista blog: "As most of you know, today is my last day as a fulltime employee at Microsoft. It’s been an exciting 16+ years and all I can say is that I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to be in this industry and at Microsoft. What an incredible chance to work with such a great set of people. I was also very fortunate to be in an environment that allowed me to work on a team that was able to have such a positive and significant impact on the way people play and work with technology." Read more here, it's funny.

On the similar note, I have decided to start afresh too with my computer at home. It's time to finally retire Windows XP that is still left in my machine. It was there all along, and I didn't remove it, you know, just in case As it turns out, I have not booted into Windows XP for quite some time, and it's safe to say that I don't have nor need anything that works in Windows XP but not in Windows Vista. As many of you will be installing (or get someone to help you install) Windows Vista on your machine in the near future (Mac OS X users shut up :p), I thought it'll be good if I write down my step-by-step process of installing Windows Vista, which I hope will be valuable for you when you have decided to take the plunge

Preparation and Planning


Current disk setup

On top is my current partitions setup. Looking at this, my plan is to remove Windows XP partition and install a new fresh Windows Vista on it. When I'm sure that I've moved everything from my current Windows Vista setup (the last partition), I will eventually remove that partition as well. Two choices I have by then. Either extend the green partition to create a new Backup partition, or to install Mac OS X on that empty partition. We'll see What do you think?


Current disk usage

As My Documents partition is getting full, the next thing that I would like to do is to move Downloads partition probably about 10 or 20 GB to the right to make space so I can extend My Documents drive another 10 or 20 GB to 60 or 70 GB. This one is tricky. I have downloaded Partition Logic, free partitioning tool, but not in the mood to do heavy system wide change at the moment. It's 46 minutes before my planned bed time anyway :-p, so not much time to explore, maybe over the weekend It's 44 minutes now :-p

Saturday lunch time, I went for farewell party for Ravindi (who's heading back Srilanka for her wedding, and well, for good) and Winarto (who's heading back Jakarta for dunno-what). We wanted to go to Marche in Suntec City, but didn’t realized that it has been closed already, so we ended up in New York New York in City Link Mall. After we finished about 2+ pm, it was quite an odd time to go back home. I was thinking if I went back home, I'll reach home about 3 pm, and I have to come out again at 3.30 pm for young adults fellowship in Bugis at 4.30 pm.

So, I decided to head to Orchard instead to join a friend for shopping haha... We ended up about 4pm before we headed to Bugis. Over there, we had a fellowship and played a game where we formed a very long line using whatever we have on our body (except clothes of course). So, everything came out, from belts to handphone, PDA, wallets, credit cards, name cards, handphone pouch, shoes, shoe laces, anything that we have. You can see what we ended up with hehe...

This is what you call a teamwork result !!!

After fellowship, we wanted to go to Chinatown for dinner, but somehow ended up in Raffles City and City Link Mall (again) for shopping (again) *haiz* After shopping, we headed to Marina Square for a few games of Pools, before we went to Happy Pot at Makansutra besides Esplanade for supper. We were there until like 3 AM in the morning.


Happy Pot, nice supper

The next Sunday morning, somehow I woke up very early, and couldn't sleep anymore. I went out, then reached church early for meeting. I went back from church, and I only managed to sleep after 2 AM in the morning. As a result, similar to Vero, I was not feeling well Monday morning also, so I stayed at home and tried to get some more sleep. I woke up about 11 am, wanted to go to office, but my headache asked me to stay at home, so I did. What a weekend...

Over the weekend, I finally removed the final piece of Windows XP installation remaining on my machine. I wiped out Windows XP partition, then booted using a Windows Vista Bootable DVD. Enter my product key for Windows Vista Ultimate Edition, select which partition to install to, and that's it. Two TV advertisements break later (about thirty minutes), the installation is done. Enter your user name, password, select wallpaper, time zone, and that's more or less about it. Done. Can't get simpler than that.

The first thing I checked was if all my hardware are installed correctly. All drivers, except two, are installed correctly. The two are my Linksys USB Wireless adapter (detected as Unknown Device) and Realtek built-in sound card in my motherboard (detected as Multimedia Sound Device). Since my wireless network couldn't work, I plugged in my machine using LAN cable directly to my router, ran Windows Update, a total of 13 updates were found, including drivers for those two missing, along with some updated drivers for my video card and the latest Windows Mobile Device Center (ActiveSync replacement).

Done with that, the next destination is the Control Panel. I changed just a couple of things here:

• Indexing Options, change Selected Locations to include all drives I have.
• Keyboard properties, change repeat delay to the shortest. I like fast stuff
• Folder options, uncheck Hide extensions for known file types and check Use check boxes to select items (So I can use checkboxes instead of Ctrl+click click click to select multiple items in Explorer)

Soon after, it's the installation time. Here are the stuffs I always install for my new machine.

• Adobe Flash Player 9 (no Flash, no YouTube :p)
• Windows Live Messenger 8.1
• Messenger Plus Live (must have add-on for Windows Live Messenger)
• IE7Pro (if you use IE7 in either XP/2003/Vista, this is a recommended add-on to have crash recovery, mouse gesture, undo close tab, etc. features, generally the features in Firefox that I miss in IE7. With this, I find myself use IE7 so much more than Firefox now)
• Flickr Uploadr (to upload photos to Flickr)
• Daemon Tools (to mount ISO files)
• Mozilla Firefox (even I use it much less now, but it's still a must-have)
• MozBackup (restore my Firefox profile backup with ease. When it's done, it gets uninstalled :p)
• Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 (custom install to choose only Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote)
• Winzip 11
• Adobe Reader 8
• Java SE Runtime Environment 6 – so I can use Internet Banking
• ATI Radeon Catalyst 7.1 Display Driver for Windows Vista
• K-Lite Mega Codec Pack v1.64
• Microsoft Money 2007 Home Edition
• BlogJet for blogging purposes
• ACDSee 9 Photo Manager, which took more than an hour to catalogue my 22,336 photos.
• Yahoo Messenger 8.1
• floAt's Mobile Agent 2.1 (a must-have for Sony Ericsson's phone user)

With these, my machine is now highly usable already

Update: Windows Vista install part 2 tells more application that I installed after this.

Five years ago, 3rd February 2002, Jakarta was flooded, my house was spared. Exactly five years later, 3rd February 2007, after two days and one night of rain in Jakarta, and this is the result. Not to mention that this is a best-case scenario. Worst case scenario in Jakarta, according to news I read, was up to four metres high (or deep, depending on whether you see from the ground or water level :p) For many days, there were no electricity, some places don't even have water. Phone lines were cut, there are limited supply of food and basic necessities around, shops don't take cards for payment because there wasn't any phone line, but ATM around was not working also, so no cash.

Here are the photos I got from my house in Jakarta:

Entrance to my house complex

  
From left to right: Roads to get into my house complex, my grandma's house, and my house.

Not in picture is another of my house, which according to my parents has hit chest-high at its peak *sad*

For God so loVed the world

    that He gAve

       His onLy

       BegottEn

           SoN

          thaT whoever

    Believes In Him

       shall Not perish

    but have Eternal life.

John 3:16 (NIV)

It's a refreshing 10-days break to Jakarta, although the days were quite packed those ten days, but it was a good break nonetheless.

Reached home at Singapore about 9.30+ pm, and was duly into the tasks of unpackings. Spent significant amount of time in office to read and follow up on my emails, as well as catching up, get updates, discussion and planning from my two teams for the past three working days I was not around. And now, service is resumed, back to normal