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Windows Vista

Danhalen said:
I'm a sucker for the all the "pretty UI" enhancements they've been teasing me with. That, and it's free. Plus, I have an extra machine.
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WindowsBlinds and a Vista theme. Although, MS has been trying to keep Vista skins off the net, but you know how it goes; once online, always online. :p

As for the OS itself, I highly doubt I will get it. I happen to like my PC the way it is, and I don't want some new OS making me feel like it's suddenly ancient because it's a badly coded pos.
 
I thought that as well, Tygirwulf. But I'm burning the DVD as we speak, and I'm actually feeling quite excited about it. Ah, the geek in me isn't dead yet!

On the other hand, I do have more than one PC; I might not be quite so gung-ho about installing a beta OS if I didn't.
 
I'm a long time WindowsBlind user and I've been running one the Vista skins for a while with per-pixel alpha blending (e.g. "glass" title bars" and even anow have a round start button however it doesn't look as nice as the standard Vista Aero interface.
 
Yes, it does look quite nice. It's a bit strange trying to navigate around the place, I can't find half the things I'm looking for. Par for the course with a new UI I suppose.

As you might have gathered from that I've got it up and running. The installation went very smoothly indeed - no problems at all, and I can switch back to XP with no problems either. The only catch is that with it effectively being a new installation it hasn't sorted out the applications and things that are on the other drives. And it hasn't found some drivers that are only on my original C drive either (obviously enough - shame there weren't some included though, it's not like my hardware is from Mars).
Perhaps some tinkering with the transfer wizard might resolve that.

Edited to add: I don't think it's as much that it's a memory hog, just that it's very aggressively prefetching data for the OS. If you start other things up I think that will reduce. In any event moving around the system seems to be quicker than XP; I was expecting it to be slower. If that is a result of the prefetching it will be interesting to see if it turns to treacle when I use it properly.
 
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Just installed it on an old Dell GX150, which is just on the cusp of being vista-compatible (1Ghz, 384MB RAM).

It crashed.

The problem was the Intel 815 on-board graphics chip so rather than mucking around trying to find a driver for it I popped in an ATI Rage Pro and it booted up fine.

My first impression is that it is a bit like our Labour govt - a nanny state. It confused me when it asked me if my network was public or private. It is on a lan with an internet gateway so I said 'private'. I guess that is for the firewall settings - it drops its pants if you say private but puts on a chastity belt if you say 'public'. But why doesn't it just say that it is adjusting the firewall settings?

With so little RAM the hard disk is getting a thrashing so I'll add some more when I get a chance.
The GUI does look quite good, I have to admit.
 
Well, I'm back in XP-Land today. Couldn't find a driver for my network card (3Com 3CRDAG675 wireless). No network = no likey. Pity, that. Oh well, I'll have another go later.
 
I don't think there is a driver for that 3com card. :(

In fact, the one thing that has annoyed me about this beta is the serious lack of driver support for some pretty common hardware.

I hope the release version has a larger installed driver base.
 
Oleron said:
I don't think there is a driver for that 3com card. :(

In fact, the one thing that has annoyed me about this beta is the serious lack of driver support for some pretty common hardware.

I hope the release version has a larger installed driver base.
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I agree, I have two USB wireless network adaptors and neither of them have a driver (and both of them are under 12 months old). One I can get to work sort of it in an intermittent manner using the old XP driver the other just doesn't exist as far as Beta 2 is concerned. Strangely though the intermittent one did work under previous builds of Vista?

But one of the reasons for having a public Beta is for MS to get this final data, and to give them some credit it this has happened in all their final betas from Win95 to WinXP.
 
Oleron said:
In fact, the one thing that has annoyed me about this beta is the serious lack of driver support for some pretty common hardware.
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According to Microsoft they have coverage for over 90% of devices, but typically enough the missing 10% includes virtually all of mine.
 
I'm trying to remember which game it was on but I remember a telephone discussion with the developers during the last push to gold and we'd just had a new build in for QA. This was the version now meant to be complete for supporting all game controllers (joysticks and the like).

Unfortunately we had a slight problem, two of the required input devices didn't work, one of the dev-team was quite belligerent about this (probably been working 24 hours to get the final devices supported) "But that's only two devices out of the 20 odd the game will support" to which I replied, "true but without keyboard and mouse support....".
 
Vista is evil. Requiring Vista for Direct X 10... They so could not get away with this crap if they didn't have a monopoly. Innovation my ___. :(
 
I can't get the damn audio driver to work. Apparently it's a common problem with conexant ac-link (all over the Microsoft fora).
 
Darat said:
I agree, I have two USB wireless network adaptors and neither of them have a driver (and both of them are under 12 months old).
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I thought manufacturers typically wrote the drivers, submitted them to microsoft for testing (i.e. logo complliance) who then signed them and added them to the build. And I thought manufacturers typically a) first did drivers for their most common devices out there, which usually aren't their brand new ones; and b) usually wait 'til the later betas when microsoft has stopped screwing around with the APIs so much.
 
I suppose the I/O prioritization is not yet included in this beta? Does this kind of design exist in other operating systems? Sounds to me like this could be the answer to reduce those horrible lags almost any Windows system has when there is a lot of hard disk activity.
 
Will this mean that at long last a PC can format a floppy disc without bringing the rest of the system to a standstill? :)
 
I've had it working on a laptop with a variety of processors, 1 or 2 gigs of RAM and a GeForce Go 6600 card. It easily exceeds the vista premium specs except the graphics drivers don't install (ends up using the MS DX8.1 version, which doesn't allow for Aqua, sorry, I mean "glass", and automatic updates crash it sometimes. And it's not very exciting for something that was started before my cat was born. He was up and running way faster, although with each passing year he does seem to use up more resources too.
 
Hey, I know why I'm getting Vista: It comes with Purble's Place!! Yippeeeee!!!:) :) :)

No, but seriously, the only feature I am really looking forward to is better Tablet PC support, including the ability to train the system to your handwriting better. I have an XP Tablet PC, right now. I happen to like it, but handwriting recognition is something of a low point.

I have the Vista Beta running on a VirtualPC, at the moment. The sound doesn't work, and it doesn't accept my graphics card as "Glass" capable. But, I am sure that is VirtualPC's problem, not Vista's problem. In a week I will have a hard drive prepared to install Vista natively. We'll see how it goes.

I am preparing a bit of a list of other enhancements I happen to find noteworthy. I'll let you in on that, as soon as I conjure it up completely.
 
joyrex said:
I suppose the I/O prioritization is not yet included in this beta? Does this kind of design exist in other operating systems? Sounds to me like this could be the answer to reduce those horrible lags almost any Windows system has when there is a lot of hard disk activity.
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This has been in the linux kernel for some time. IO priority support was added in the 2.6 kernel. Here is the announcement of a patch from 2004 that, as far as I can tell, neatly adds support for the sort of priority levels that the white paper describes (support for other types of IO scheduling having been added previously):

http://kerneltrap.org/node/4406

I can also honestly claim I've never experienced horrible lag from disk activity on linux -- in fact, I've never experienced any lag at all from disk activity... rarely perhaps from the process that is actually doing the disk access. Never for other processes running concurrently.
 
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