Windows Vista RC1 Review Thread

[Michael Morris]

Microsoft has released a free public trial of the Windows Vista OS which you can download now at

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista

I strongly urge caution when installing this program. Though it is believed to be mostly stable, I have observed crashes. I strongly advise installing Vista onto it's own partition of your computer, that way if you need to fallback to your current copy of Windows XP you may do so.

That said, I have it up on my home computer but I'm still getting used to it. I'll write a more full review later in the thread. I encourage others to do as well, just please follow the guidelines above and I can't stress this enough - backup, backup, BACKUP!!

 

[Michael Morris]

Well, so far, silence. While my graphics card is installed and running fine, the Creative Audigy card doesn't have drivers. I went to creative's site to download the vista drivers, but vista refused to take them, citing them as unsigned. I went through the installation process - it *looked* like it was going to work. So let's see if I can find a solution.

 

[Michael Morris]

Apparently Creative has no proper drivers for the public beta version of Windows Vista. I installed the drivers they do have, but they are unsigned. I tried a reinstall but it hung and at this point it looks like I'll have to reinstall it. Well, I have a game to prepare for tomorrow so I'll pass and look into it perhaps on Sunday. In the meanwhile I'm happily back on Windows XP.

 

[Mycanid]

Yeah ... sigh ... it often takes months (if not years) for them to sort out the whole drivers thing. What a pain in the neck.

Well - at least you know with a FREE copy and not with a paid one eh?

BTW - on an OT note ... you decide where your adventure was in fact going? You were asking about it in the "General RPG" section and I haven't heard anything for a while.

 

[trancejeremy]

Be careful with "free" trials. I tried the 6 month trial 64 bit version of WinXP, and it ran out only after 4 months! (I was planning on buying it anyway, but caught me by surprise)

 

[Michael Morris]

Vista beta preview expires on the 31st March according to it's EULA

 

[IronWolf]

I haven't been able to get too enthused about Vista yet. The laptop I use is Vista Capable and is the most likely candidate when the beast it released (dual booting with Linux, which is the main OS I use on it now). I am interested in reading folks thoughts about it as they play with it though.

 

[Jdvn1]

I have a friend who's trying out Vista--he likes it, though it's lacking a lot of drivers.

 

[Morrus]

Could you highlight some of the basic differences betwen Vista and XP?

What will the average user notice has changed?

 

[Michael Morris]

The visual layout is vastly changed - ESPECIALLY if you have a high end graphics card that is Direct X 10 capable. Vista also supports "Gadgets" which are tiny programs which sit on your desktop and an idea lifted off of Linux GUI and later Mac GUI's "widgets"

I'll probably write a Vista Gadget to do ENWorld RSS feeds when I get a chance to get a feel for XAML (new programming standard in Vista).

Security is a lot tighter in Vista, and the program does a lot better job helping track files but until I have a sound driver for it I'm not going to be giving it a true workout.