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main PC. You might even pick up a used box' off of Craig's List for a couple of hundred bucks specifically to hack around on.

I highly advise Googling ahead of time things such as your specific brand and model of printer, scanner, camera, sound card, video card, etc., and the word Vista' to see if others have had incompatibility problems. Also, do the same for your important software applications If problems do exist, the odds are somebody else out there has been through the wringer before you and posted the aggravation on a blog somewhere and it may save you a lot of headache.

Wait for a quiet time when you have nothing better to do, brew up a nice hot cup of peppermint tea or uncork a bottle of your favorite sedative and fire the mother up, hopefully with your regular PC nearby connected to the Net so you can Google any questions you might have out into the ether to find help. I would leave the VISTA computer offline for the time being.

I usually keep a notepad nearby and jot down complications, errors, dead ends and most importantly, successes, so I'll know how to do the installation again as I certainly will need to when Vista eventually gets moved over onto my primary computer.

You will shake your head, you will swear, you will Google for help (sometimes finding it, sometimes not) and you will give up in exasperation and shut it down for another day. But the really cool part is that nothing is critical, you've still got your primary computer to do your essential work, so your butt is covered. Sometime later you will fire it up again and in all likelihood find a solution or at least a work around to the problem and move on.

I'm currently running two computers with Vista, two with XP and one with 98, there were problems and adjustments (the scanner only works on XP), but I figured them out and survived the ordeal You will, too.

Learn more about this author, Richard Tafilaw.
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