In the spirit of reviewing, two nights ago I gave the HTC Shift restore feature a try. There are no discs included with the Shift, just a recovery partition containing an image of Vista Business, the original applications and the drivers.

Quite a good idea actually, sure it chews up a bit of the relatively cramped 40GB HDD, but at least you’ll know that if something goes wrong (virus, damaged system file, etc) you can just hold F3 while booting, and bring it back to the default state.

In my experience however, not all was moonlight and roses. Getting the recovery going was a simple matter, and it happened quite quickly too (less than 30mins). Booting for the first time takes ages, but eventually I hit the Vista desktop, straight into a driver warning.

Vista was telling me that the driver for the WiFi card needed to be installed. Letting Vista search itself turned up nothing, nor did digging through the HTC folder in Program Files. A card in the Shift’s box mentioned the “Software Pack” for the Shift could be downloaded from the HTC site, but only a few manuals and a FAQ.

It took some searching of xda-developers to turn up the right driver, something most users would not think to do (and probably haven’t heard of).

While there are few Shift owners out there, has anyone else come across this problem? On my machine the WiFi driver was the only thing that wasn’t installed, everything else worked perfectly after the recovery.