One day with vista

I finally took the plunge and installed Windows Vista on my home PC.  Despite the huge amount of hype it's not something I'd been desperate to use what with the first time I saw it (a few years ago at a Microsoft Technet Roadshow) the presenters (all Microsoft staff) had trouble making Vista do even the most basic of tasks.

However I felt I'd give it a shot, it's been 2 years since that first presentation, surely they have it working by now...

It all started off well, from formatting to being on the desktop it only took 30 minutes.  Thats where the good fortune stopped.  It then took an hour to get my wireless network card to behave.  Now in fairness this isn't all Microsofts fault.  The vista upgrade advisor didn't flag up any issues with my hardware however it didn't take into account the distinct lack of 64bit drivers for netgear products.  If you go to http://www.atheros.cz/ you can find generic drivers for most wireless chipsets, for my netgear WPN311 I used the AR5004G drivers.  After forcing the network card to use the atheros drivers I was at least back online.

The next fun task was installing Office 2007 and connecting Outlook into works exchange mailbox.  There is one major issue here.  Our exchange system is built on Small Business Server 2003 and as such uses Self-Signed security certificates to authenticate everything.  However Vista appears to not like self-signed certificates which causes a few problems, for instance it won't allow Outlook to connect to my exchange server.

No matter what I tried, Vista/Outlook wouldn't behave (ridiculous for two flagship products) until half way through a game of the new Mahjong that is bundled with the OS, outlook sprung to life and everything worked.  I'm not 100% sure what I did to fix it but here goes anyway.

1. Run Internet Explorer 7 as an Administrator (right click then select run as admin on IE icon)
2. Log into your exchange server via Outlook Web Access (OWA)
3. When you get the error message saying invalid certificate click continue to get to the normal OWA login screen
4. On the address bar at the top click on the red certificates box then click View Certificates
5. Click on install certificates on the pop up window
6. When asked to choose the certificate store select "Place certificate in the following store" then from the list select "Trusted Root Certificates"
7. At this point I gave up as it still didn't work and started playing Mahjong, suddenly it started working! 

Here's to finding out what else is broken!!

tags: microsoft  vista  techbet  outlook 2007  rpc  http  exchange  exchange 2003  mahjong