OK – I just helped a friend buy a new laptop computer. Her previous computer, a 6 year old Windows XP laptop was stolen. We considered going Mac but she isn’t rich and we found the above computer on sale at Fry’s. After checking with friends I’m told that Vista has graduated from terrible to at least not terrible. We are about to start the process of turning it on for the first time and going through the install. So this is going to be a live install and as we go through the steps I’m going to report live the good, the bad, and the ugly.

First, the specs. The above computer is a Fujitsu Lifebook A3130. Features are as follows:

1. AMD Turion 64 bit X2 processor
2. 2 gigs of ram – (Vista likes lots of ram)
3. 160 GB drive
4. 15.4 inch 1280×800 screen
5. DVD Dual Layer – R/W burner, 5 USB ports, Firewire,2 PCM/CIA, memory stick reader, etc.
6. Only cost $700

Amazing how much power you get for just $700. Wow!

The user is a Japanese lady named Junko. She is a normal consumer-level user who will need both English and Japanese installed. The goal is to get it up and running, download various upgrades, delete all the unnecessary garbage and install Firefox, Thunderbird, Star Office and whatever else we need to get her basically going; not doing anything fancy and hoping for “just works”.

So this article is going to grow as we go through the process. Whatever happens I’m going to write about it as it occurs. Feel free to add comments.

Unboxed the computer. It appears to actually be new rather than a return. When you shop at Frys you never know what you’ll get. They are bad for trying to sell you used and possibly defective merchandise as new, so you have to watch out. I have it plugged in and lights on the front make me think that the batteries are charging.

Turned it on. Came up in text mode at first and it appears to be installing. I’m guessing it has some kind of install partition. Gui screen up but in a “Please Wait” mode. Looks very busy. It appears to have just run an installer and is now actually booting Vista for the first time.

We are now picking the picture, user name and password. She chose the goldfish. Also got to choose the desktop picture. The eye candy has improved a lot during install. Good progress indicator bars. I hate it when computers sit there for minutes and you don’t know if it’s thinking or crashed.

I notice that the desktop icons still have that damn arrow in the lower right hand corner. I was hoping they would have gotten rid of that by now. We have gone through the second reboot. I think it’s telling us that, unless we register, some things are going to be in cripple mode. (Obviously they didn’t word it that way but I know what it means.)

I went to Windows Update first, you always do that with Windows and we’re downloading 44 updates. About 112 megs or so. So far so good. Everything has worked to this point. Still waiting on the initial updates to download and complete.

Installing updates ….. ZZZZZZzzzzzzzZZZZZZzzzzzzzzZZZZZZZzzzzzz

In the meantime, I installed Firefox and Thunderbird. If there are any other must haves leave it in the comments and put a link to where we can download it.

OK – rebooting after installing 44 updates. ZZZzzzzZZZZzzz

Took 10 minutes to process the 44 updates after boot but finally ready to log in.

Went to the menu, selected Japanese and she is now typing Japanese emailing her mother.

OK – so at this point I have to say, it just works. Not a single thing went wrong. Nothing looked stupid. The initial upgrade took a little longer than I expected but that’s no big deal. It didn’t do any nagging on registration. I assume it went out and registered with MS or something but I’m giving it a thumbs up and I’m going to say that it was the smoothest install of any OS I have ever done in my life.

Granted that I haven’t tried to do anything tricky yet and haven’t read any instructions at all, so I can’t say it’s fully tested. But for the task that I set out here, Vista gets 100% and not only did everything just work, but the presentation during the install was excellent. So on top of the 100%, I’m giving extra points for style. I’ve never turned on a virgin Mac, but the Mac would have to be very impressive to match this.

It worked better than I expected. But my expectations were low based on what people were saying. One thing about Microsoft is that even if they introduce something that’s broken, they do eventually fix it.

For those of you running a Linux desktop and wondering why people pay big bucks for Windows when they can get Linux for nothing, this is why. When you turn it on and everything just works, that’s worth paying for.

If the average person tried to do the same thing with ANY distro it would cost them more money to hire a geek than Windows cost. And even then I doubt everything would work. Linux is lucky to get the screen right and you can probably forget about using the wireless lan. And you’re not going to just browse to YouTube and watch a video.

Maybe later I should install a dual boot with Linux. Someone tell me which distro to put up against Vista. Do we have a challenger? I’d love to call Linux the winner. In fact I’m biased in favor of Linux. So – who has a Linux distro to go up against Vista?

I also have to say that this is one fine laptop. It has that, “I really like this laptop” feel. Sort of the way you feel if you own a Honda. Thumbs up on Fujitsu Lifebooks.