So I'm kinda freaking out here as I'm running out of time to get a portable Vista install going for my IIS 7 presentation at DevTeach next month. I've installed Vista on several different machines at this point – 1 on a desktop which works fine, one in VPC on my current laptop which is so slow it's unusable and one on an old heavy laptop that I would prefer not to take with me as I'm shuttling to Hood River then to DevTeach.

It's interesting to see the performance difference on these installs. The standalone machine is pretty damn slow running Vista which is strange because it's a reasonably fast machine (A P4 2.4ghz with fast video), but it's pretty slow running Vista. Vista installed on my old LapTop (An older P4 2ghz machine with slow HD and video) actually runs considerably faster than the desktop which is very bizarre.

Ultimately I'd like to get Vista to run on my current LapTop though so that I don't have to lug around a second laptop which also has a hardware issue and might crash any day <g>. Something's wrong with the memory bus that keeps burning out memory chips.

VPC Install - Denied

Soooo… I have gotten a recent Vista build to finally install using VPC on this machine. It runs, but it's so slow it's truly unusable. It takes 20 seconds to bring up a window of any source, slower if it's an Explorer related window.

I think the problem is that it will not install the Virtual Machine Additions specific to Vista. It can install the stock VM Additions, but that doesn't seem to help much. The build I'm running is 5361. The only reason I'm running this non-standard build is that 5308 will not under any circumstances install on my VPC installation crashing outright during the serial number entry with VPC.

This is a royal bummer, because VPC on this machine really works well -  it seems to have enough horsepower to make . I have a Windows 2003 VPC session set up here that runs faster on this machine than my old laptop natively, so I had high hopes that Vista on VPC was a possibility.

External USB Install – Denied

So today I thought I'd give it a try using my USB drive to install on. I was able to re-partition the drive and get Vista to install onto the external drive, but it blue screens after the initial reboot. It loads from the drive but bombs immediately while trying to load the OS. It blue screens and shuts off so quickly I can't even see the blue screen message – it more like blue blur of death.

So that's out as well. This really bites especially since the install to get that far took close to two hours of slow installation – what the fuck does Vista do to run so slow during install? Installations creep along at an incredibly slow speed regardless of where you install to.

So I'm still no wiser and I'm ready to just cancel the damn session. I've been wasting enough time trying to make this stuff just run let alone actually work on my session related content.