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