I wanted to take a screen shot of part of a website that I'm building at the moment. Googled around for 'Vista screenshot' and discovered the Vista Snipping Tool. Type snipping tool into the Command Bar on the Start Menu and away you go. The only thing I don't seem to be able to grab is the Command Bar on the Start Menu. Ha ha ha.

I'm trying to upload an image to a router at the moment and to do this I need a tftp client. I'm running Vista Ultimate (64 bit) and it doesn't have a tftp client installed as default. It's hidden away in 'Turn Windows features on or off'. Nice one :)

I've been toying with the idea of upgrading my desktop machine from Vista 32 to Vista 64 for two reasons. Firstly I've got a 64bit dual core AMD processor and I want to use it! Secondly I want to be able to use all of the memory in the PC; it's got 4GB and whilst 2^32 is 4.1GB, by the time you take off the video memory and some other hardware reservations the useable memory is about 3.5GB.

So last night I took the plunge and installed from scratch. It gave me the opportunity to stripe the three disks that are in the box too. The Vista performance indicator was telling me that with a score of 5.0, the disk performance was my lowest score.

It took about 35 minutes to install Vista on top of the striped disks... and then another 45 minutes to upgrade that keyless installation with the same image to get around the limitation of only having a Vista upgrade disk. No problems to speak of so far as there are 64 bit drivers for all of my hardware but I'm not surprised to find this as for once I'd done my research before jumping in feet first.

There are drivers for my motherboard's RAID chipset, my Nvidia video cards, Creative Audigy sound card (that's about 3 years old), mouse, webcam, Garmin satnav and my Blackberry. The only thing that doesn't seem to be working is the installer for Sony Ericsson's PC Suite but to be honest I can live without that. I was only looking for the USB driver that I can get from somewhere else when and if I need it.

I've still got one unknown device showing in Device Manager but that is the Creative sound card's game port that I can happily live without.

Striping the disks has given me a performance boost. According to Vista I now have a performance score of 5.4 with the processor being the lowest score with everything else at 5.9 bar the gaming graphics score of 5.8. It isn't going to justify an upgrade to a quad core box despite the availablity of the new shiney AMD Phenom quad core chips!

I installed Vista on my main machine at home a couple of months ago, installing XP, Vista and Ubuntu, each on their own disk. Originally Vista was the RC2 release, a late beta that wasn't 100% stable, so last week I installed the Business edition that I've had kicking around for a couple of weeks. So far I've been fairly happy with it, not booting back into XP once since the install. There are a couple of funnies; HP don't have any 3-in-1 software for my printer/fax/scanner that will work under Vista (going to try and install the software on an XP VMware instance for those once in a blue moon times that I need it and failing that I'll borrow Jen's scanner!). The other funny is that Ultramon (multi-monitor app) has problems displaying wallpaper on screens to the right of the primary monitor. Wierd!!

Today I tried burning a CD for the first time. Under XP I always relied on Nero to burn my disks, never having had any success using the built in application. So I thought I'd try the built in functionality under Vista. Three failures later it's time to find out if Nero works under Vista!