RC1 experiences

Vista RC1 was available to me as an employee to try. So, having prep'd myself with my Maxtor Mini Onetouch and backed up my home computers I went about installing the new OS.

My home PC is a Sony Vaio A190 and its quite handy and portable as well as being sufficient big in screen and features to do most of the things you do at home. It was on Windows XP SP2 and I decided to wipe the machine and boot to Vista RC1. The XP machine was starting to crunch a little and this meant hanging around waiting for things to happen. This was probably a result of the C: drive (16Gb) running out of space. A boot into Vista was relatively painless (the first DVD didn't work which scared me); burned another and it was happy. A while later I have a working build. I like most of what I have found, but there are a few expectations:

  • UAC - it's still not quite friendly - after the nth time you start to get annoyed
  • My FAN (probably GPU) is running way too fast and noisy - not a good sign
  • My Maxtor Onetouch software doesn't work in this version (so far)

What confused me:

  • Where do I sync my mobile - Atom XDA? No options in WMDC or Sync Center
  • Flip3d worked once them disappeared
  • I couldn't install Office 2003 - problem with trying to amend mapisvc.info which only the system account is allowed to change

Now my Mac Mini project was taking a verbal hammering from my wife. So I decided to use Bootcamp 1.1 which involved reinstalling Mac OSX (thanks to Joe, and no it wasn't fast but it was painless). Bootcamp worked first time and I went directly to Vista.

This build Vista installed without deleting the EFI partition ( a good thing if I want to install a new Bootcamp later).

When it finally did it stuff (without a crash this time) it loaded and only two devices were unrecognised. I found that many of the devices had more up to date drivers when checked manually. I then installed the Mac drivers for XP (didn't complete properly) which started doing nasty things to my existing drivers (went back to Vista Basic). When I reapplied the WDDM driver for the Intel 950 Aero came back. Note: aero has never worked on my Mac Mini in Vista before now. Additionally Bluetooth now appeared. The two remaining devices are "performance counters" and a warning on a HID device. Again the Maxtor drive would not be recognised from the Maxtor backup software.

MCE crashed when I first went to setup the TV signal (not good) then when I tried again the picture from the TV was very stuttery. I decided to use the beta drivers for the DVico Nano as they have a newer date. The problem didn't go away. Incidentally I copied all my videos, music and pictures over (but had to copy the recordable TV to the public folder to make it be recognised).

I then tried playback on the videos and they were stuttery too. This suggests the problem is not the TV tuner but probably something else.

So, Vista 2 Me 0.

I try again tomorrow after seeking advice from my colleagues and will post back!