When I was writing Deconstructing Golden Tee LIVE, I interviewed several game designers who all told me the same thing – users go through a period during which they resist change before they embrace it. I’m wondering whether the same thing is occurring with Windows Vista.

Many die hard Windows XP users I’ve talked with insist that they’re going to stick with XP at least until Microsoft “works out all the bugs in Vista.” Many of these users haven’t even tried Vista. They simply have a knee-jerk reaction against it.

Apparently, Microsoft is well aware that this is going on. Relatively recently, the company did a little experiment called The Mojave Experiment. They wanted to know what people would think of Vista if they didn’t know it was Vista: Would they still hate it?

Overwhelmingly, the answer was No. People who used Windows Vista not knowing they were using Vista reported that they loved the operating system.

Admittedly, I was a little hesitant to use Vista at first, and I really didn’t like it. I didn’t like having to learn a new way of doing things. I knew where everything I needed was located in XP and didn’t want to have to go hunting for all that stuff again.

Over time, however, I’ve become a fan of Windows Vista. Here are some of the things I like about it:

• 3D desktop: When you have multiple application windows open in Vista, you can flip through the stack in 3D.
• Start menu search: All I have to do is click the Start button and start typing some text in the Search box to find what I’m looking for.
• Beefed up media features: I especially like the new Windows Movie Maker, which now allows me to burn my video to a recordable DVD to play on my TV’s DVD player.
• New sidebar and gadgets: The new sidebar in Windows Vista provides quick access to customizable mini-applications (called gadgets), which include weather updates, news headlines, late-breaking sports scores, your personal calendar, a calculator, and other often-used features and tools.
• New backup utility: Everyone tells you to back up the files on your computer, but Windows XP offers a shoddy backup utility. Vista improves the backup capabilities of Windows, enabling you to back up your files to recordable CDs or DVDs, external hard drives, and other backup media.
• Speech recognition: If you’d rather bark out commands than point and click with a mouse, Windows Vista can accommodate your preference. Equip your computer with a microphone, train Vista to tune its ear to your voice, and you’re ready to enter commands and type without touching your keyboard or mouse. The more you use the feature, the better it works!
• Windows SideShow: Designed for notebook computers, Windows SideShow enables you to display critical information on a secondary or auxiliary screen whether the notebook is on, off, or in sleep mode. In other words, you don’t have to power up your computer to view meeting schedules, phone numbers, addresses, and recent e-mail messages. This saves you gobs of time and conserves battery power at the same time. Of course, your notebook computer must be equipped with a secondary or auxiliary screen.

If you’ve tried Windows Vista, I’d like to know what you think of it. Do you give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down? Why?

On March 18, 2008, Microsoft released Windows Vista Service Pack 1. Unless you disabled Automatic Updates in your version of Windows Vista, it is automatically set up to download and install important updates, so Service Pack 1 already should be installed on your computer. However, Service Pack 1 may not be installed and may not even be available for download on your computer for good reason – your computer may not be ready for it, and installing Service Pack 1 could cause problems.

In this article, I show you how to check your system for the presence of Service Pack 1, make sure Automatic Updates is enabled, and offer some guidance on how to ready your system for Service Pack 1, so you can safely download and install Service Pack 1.

Is Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Already Installed?

To determine whether Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is already installed, take the following steps:

1. Click Start (the button in the lower-left corner of the screen).
2. Right-click Computer.
3. Click Properties. The Properties dialog box appears.
4. Look under “Windows edition.” If “Service Pack 1″ is displayed, it is already installed.

Turning On Automatic Updates in Windows Vista

If Service Pack 1 is not installed, you can download and install it yourself, but I discourage you from doing so. To avoid causing problems with device drivers that are known to conflict with Service Pack 1, Microsoft does not offer Service Pack 1 as an automatic update for computers on which these drivers are loaded. You’re better off making sure Automatic Updates is enabled and letting it decide when to install Service Pack 1.

Letting Automatic Updates download and install Service Pack 1 benefits you in two ways:

• If you download and install Service Pack 1 yourself, you have to download a huge installation file. When Automatic Updates does it for you, it checks to see whether some of the files included in Service Pack 1 are already installed and downloads only the files you need.
• Automatic Updates checks your system to ensure that it can install Service Pack 1 safely on your computer.

To check (and perhaps change) your Automatic Update settings, do the following:

1. Click Start.
2. Click All Programs.
3. Click Windows Update.
4. Click Change Settings.
5. Make sure Install Updates Automatically is selected. (You can change the day and time on which Automatic Updates checks for, downloads, and installs updates.)
6. Click OK.

Learn More About Service Pack 1

Microsoft offers several articles about Service Pack 1. If Service Pack 1 is already installed and you’ve encountered no problems, you can safely skip these articles. If Service Pack 1 is not installed or shown as an available update, if you want to know more about Service Pack 1 before installing it, or if you installed it and are encountering problems, here are some resources you can tap for additional information:

• “Information about Windows Vista Service Pack 1“
• “How to obtain the latest Windows Vista service pack“
• “Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is not available for installation from Windows Update and is not offered by Automatic Updates“
• Support for Windows Vista, including support for Service Pack 1

Download and Install Updated Device Drivers

One of the biggest issues that can get in the way of installing Windows Vista Service Pack 1 on your computer is potential conflicts with existing device drivers. If you have a device driver that’s preventing Windows Service Pack 1 from automatically installing on your computer, contact the manufacturer for an updated driver.

The article “Windows Vista Service Pack 1 is not available for installation from Windows Update and is not offered by Automatic Updates” contains a list of drivers that are known to conflict with Service Pack 1.

The article “Information about Windows Vista Service Pack 1” Microsoft also provides contact information for various manufacturers, but you can obtain a directory of manufacturers along with their contact information at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/vendors/en -us.

Before you take the plunge to upgrade your computer from an earlier version of Windows to Windows Vista, determine whether your computer has what it takes to run Vista. You don’t have to try to decipher the gobbledygook on Vista package – the Minimum System Requirements. Microsoft has a nifty (FREE) tool you can download that checks your computer to determine whether it’s Vista-friendly. Simply click the following link to download and install the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor and then follow the onscreen instructions.

The Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor scans your computer and any peripheral devices attached to it and lets you know when the scan is complete. You can then click the See Details button to determine the results. The Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor then displays a screen like the one shown here, indicating whether your computer has the right stuff for Vista. (The scan may take several minutes, depending on the complexity of your computer and the number of peripheral devices attached to it.)

Warning: Windows Vista is packaged on DVD, not CDs. If your computer is not equipped with a DVD drive, you’ll need to order the Vista installation CDs. Visit the Windows Vista Alternate Media page for details.

When I turned on the new Windows Sidebar in Vista the other day, the Windows Installer popped up, displaying the Preparing to install… message. Then, another dialog box appeared with the message The feature you are trying to use is on a CD-ROM or other removable disk that is not available. The message went on to instruct me to Insert the ‘Destinations’ disk and click OK.

Unfortunately, no ‘Destinations’ disk came with the computer. I figured since this is a Windows feature, I could just insert the Windows Vista installation disk. So, I inserted that disk, waited a few moments, and clicked OK. Well, that was the wrong disk. I repeated the steps with every disc that came with my new computer. Nothing worked. I clicked Cancel to close both dialog boxes, and viola, the Windows Sidebar appeared. However, whenever I restarted the computer, those darned Windows Installer dialog boxes would appear asking me to insert the ‘Destinations’ disk. How annoying.

So, I turned off the Windows Sidebar. Not surprisingly, the Windows Installer dialog boxes no longer appeared on startup. Now, I had to figure out a way to get the Sidebar to appear without having the warnings on startup. I tried to contact Microsoft, but because Windows came installed on the Dell Inspiron I was using, they didn’t offer free 90-day support for it. I contacted Dell, and the tech person who helped me led me through the following steps:

1. Click Start, All Programs, Accessories.
2. Right-click Command Prompt and click Run As Administrator.
3. Type cd \Program Files\Windows Sidebar and press Enter.
4. Type regsvr32 -u sbdrop.dll and press Enter.
5. Type regsvr32 -u wlsrvc.dll and press Enter.
6. Type regsvr32 sbdrop.dll and press Enter.
7. Type regsvr32 wlsrvc.dll and press Enter.
8. Restart Windows.
9. Run the Windows Sidebar (Start, All Programs, Accessories, Windows Sidebar).

This essentially unregistered the sidebar .dll files and then re-registered them in Windows. It certainly did the trick for me. Some users have reported that their Windows Sidebar completely disappeared, and this is the same recommended fix for that problem.

My desktop background did not cover the entire screen afterwards, so I had to go back to my display settings and fix that:

1. Right-click a blank area on the Windows desktop and click Personalize.
2. Click Desktop Background.
3. Select the desired background and position on the desktop.

4. Click OK.

Although this solved my problem, I did some additional research and found a message on GeeksToGo about another user getting this same ‘Destinations’ disk error when he tried downloading and installing MediaPlayer11 Beta and updates for AdobeReader7. The problem was that he had a partial, corrupt installation. The fix was to download and run the Windows Installer Cleanup Tool:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301

Read the article above, download the Windows Installer Cleanup Tool, and then run it to clean up the Destinations installation and any other installations that seemed to be triggering that warning message to appear. I didn’t try this, because my problem’s been solved, but it seems like a logical solution.