The Wow is gone

Well the balance of the upgrade from Vista to XP went quite smoothly. Friday afternoon I was still suffering a little bit of the effects of the work Christmas party and Saturday morning I went shopping with the girls. So I didn't get back into it until Saturday afternoon. There was a ton of downloaded software which I installed onto the thing following mostly this guide

Aside from the hours (unattended) copying files, the biggest delay has been searching for the drivers disk for my motherboard. Who would have thought I would keep it in the empty motherboard box stacked on top of the bookcase in the spare room?

And the results?

Initially I was astounded at the difference in speed; XP really flys along compared to Vista. The HP printer driver and Yamaha USB-Midi port drivers installed without any problems. I am yet to install Sibelius, though am confident that it will be successful. When I installed Comodo Personal Firewall it slowed a tad, and little windows kept popping up telling me what was going on, but the whole machine did not stop, and the messages are getting less and less numerous the more I use it.

[Just as a side note, while I could have used the in-built Windows Firewall, I have read a number of reviews which indicate that it is less than effective. ZoneAlarm and Comodo seem to be the best choices (see for instance http://www.consumersearch.com/www/software/firewalls/review.html).]

And to top it all off, this morning I read yet another review of a Vista-to-XP upgrade. This amusing story is written as if the writer is reviewing the "new" XP operating system, and comparing it to the older, slower, Vista. Superb.