Windows Vista: Data Recovery Waiting To Happen?

Microsoft Corp., the world’s largest software manufacturer, released its first new version of Windows in five years on January 30th, 2007. Called “Vista” The question is: “are you ready to upgrade?”

Windows Vista, boasting many new features including, the ability to view, listen and record in full high definition went on sale ealry this week. The software giant will spend $450.00 million more on advertising Windows Vista this year alone.

The install and upgrade process is much faster than previous Windows versions. Moreover, Microsoft corp. expects more than twice users adopting the product as with Windows XP and five times as many as Windows 95.  Microsoft’s tag line for Vista is The “Wow” starts now. And most consumers will be “Wowed” by the shere number of different versions to choose from. Do you want Home Basic, Business, Home Premium or Ultimate? As a hard drive data recovery company DTI has been doing research on Vista way back to Alpha when it was still “Longhorn”.

Dell Inc. the world’s second largest PC manufacturer began taking orders for PC’s with Vista pre-loaded last weekend. Intern, Dell’s website was a 20% spike in visitors last weekend.

Microsoft Corp. expects a bump in sales but expects to see revenues to increase over the long term. With over one billion Windows users it is unlikely that all of them will upgrade overnight.

Through our testing of Vista as a Microsoft Certified Partner we have found Vista to be a solid and robust operating system. However, as with any massive deployment there will be pitfalls. Some users will lose data. Causes of data loss while performing an upgrade of an operating system are many including, temporary hardware failure, lack of disk space etc.

Prior to taking on such an endeavour users should back-up any critical data. The most important things will more than likely be in your “Documents And Settings” > “Primary Username” > My Documents. Don’t forget to look around “Local Settings” and “Application Data”, this is where you will find any Office Templates, Outlook PST Files, Outook Express DBX files and any stationery.

If you have any question feel free to contact us directly at 727-345-9665.

The new Vista will create new challenges in the data recovery industry. Fortunately DTI has in-house programmers that have been working on the Vista OS for over a year perfecting the means of recovery of lost data on the new Vista file structure. New Vista file system?

Originally, Vista/Longhorn was slated to include a new file system called WinFS which would work more like a relational database rather than a traditional file system such as FAT or NTFS. The WinFS file system could store files, but would also be able to store a number of attributes related to those files. In addition, the WinFS file system will be able to store things that aren’t traditionally thought of as being files. This includes contacts and E-mail messages. In the end however; WinFS was determined to be too much of an undertaking to hit Microsoft’s ever increasing release date. That doesn’t mean that you are looking at the same type of NTFS file system. Vista’s is more integrated and intelligent than the Windows XP file system.

Our hard drive data recovery engineers are fully expecting WinFS to appear in a future service pack. Fortunatly DTI is already prepared to recover Vista data no matter which file system is in place.

Prior to your install make sure you run the hardware check to make sure your computer is up to speed for Vista. Here is the link to the Vista Upgrade Advisor. Vista is by far the most hardware intensive operating system ever. The reason for this is because of a new GUI or Graphical User Interface.

When we first looked at Longhorn the interface was called Aero. At this time we will refer to it as Glass. The Glass interface requires a video card with a minimum of 64 MB of memory. Systems with less than 64 MB of video RAM can still run Vista, but the operating system will use an alternate user interface that looks more like a customized version of Windows XP. Glass is by far the most apparent change in Windows. It certainly gives the user not only a good experience, but a lot more control over data flow.

Everyone is going to have to make their own determination as to when they are going to go to Vista. If you are one of the brave that are jumping right in please remember to BACK up all of your data prior to doing the upgrade to Vista. Since I began writing this article on Thursday DTI has taken over 150 support calls from customers who have lost data during the upgrade to Vista.