Contents tagged with Vista
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[Vista] SP1 Available for MSDN Subscribers
Lots of people have now blogged about the availability of Vista SP1 on MSDN Subscription, but what is new and when will it be available for the public? I Googled around a bit...
Mike Nash on the Windows Product Management group blogs on the Windows Vista Blog:
With Service Pack 1, we have made great progress in performance, reliability and compatibility.
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...with SP1, copying or moving files around your PC, your home network or your corporate network should now be much faster.
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In addition, on many kinds of hardware, resuming a Windows Vista-based PC from sleep is faster on Service Pack 1.
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we will begin making SP1 available through Windows Update in mid-March
Mike also writes about better support for hardware, which is about time ;) There's a pretty good page on Technet which describes the Notable Changes in Windows Vista Service Pack 1.
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[Vista] Getting Daemon Tools to Work in Vista Beta 2
Try this at own risk (see below)
If you like me use Daemon tools alot and want to get it to work in Vista Beta 2 - Try downloading an older version 3.02 from the D-tools archives. It worked for me.
You may have to disable UAP to install the drivers though, which is done via the System Configuration tools (the Tools tab).
One strange thing which happened just now though is that Vista tried to re-active again it seems, and it failed. I looked at "Welcome Center" and yep - my Vista is no longer activated and when I try to activate it fails with error code 0x8007000D Not sure if it was disabling of UAP or installing D-tools that made this thing happen...
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[Vista] ATI Drivers for Vista Beta 2
Found this news article (and downloading as I write):
ATI today released a major update to its first beta generation Windows Vista graphics driver. The Catalyst Beta package fully supports the Vista Display Driver Model (VDDM) and should deliver greater stability than the previous version and allow a better look at Microsoft's AeroGlass user interface.
The driver published is available in 32-bit and 64-bit versions and supports DirectX9-compatible graphics processors, including the desktop Radeon processors 9500 and higher, the Mobility Radeon 9550 and higher series, the chipsets Crossfire 3200 and Xpress 200 and 200m as well as the workstation cards FireGL V3100 and higher and FireMV 2200 PCIE and higher.
EDIT: For some reason that I don't know, I cannot get any higher resolution than 1280 x 1024 on my 19' flat screen, which is no improvement over the drivers which were installed from start.
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[Vista] Some Things Work - Others Don't
I decided to be brave and installed Vista Beta 2 on my home computer. Because you have to format the C-drive, I made a huge, fresh backup of most of my files and went ahead with the install. Vista installed fine and started up OK with a few issues:
My ATI Radeon X850 XT gets a maximum of 1280 x 1024 - I will look for new drivers and see if that helps.
My Sound Blaster Audigy 2 zs refuse works...almost. I can use the front panel in- and output, but the output from the card on the back of the computer doesn't work at all. I'm currently running my sound via earphones from the front output... I have to investigate this further.
None of the Daemon Tools versions I've tried so far seems to work properly, which is a disaster because I got most software and backups saved as Images. IsoBuster got me going, but it's not as good as Daemon Tools (which I just luuuuuv).
I had some problems getting DNS lookups to work for some reasons. I could get to almost all webbsites except a few really important ones (like ms.com, google etc), which were pretty weird. I'm connected to the Internet via a router/firewall and have automatic IP configuration set up. I thought maybe it had something to do with IP6 or something so I just added my ISP DNS servers straight into the network settings and I've had no problems since then.
When the computer goes into Sleep mode and I want to start from it, it seems to hang in startup and I have to power off fully and press the power button again. When it starts up, it revovers from the hibernate mode, which seems to work well. Not sure why it cannot get going from Sleep mode but I'll have to investigate.
Other than that - performance is great, file copying seems to be faster than in XP (!), but maybe that was because I used a really crappy AV software. Someone blogged about some AV which worked with Vista... Ah here it is, blogged by Kristan Kenney on DigitalFile.
(All of a sudden the Media Player 11 stopped playing in a middle of a song... maybe it doesn't like David Bowie :o) I like the way Media Player 11 minimize to the system tray... I think. It takes up quite some space down there actually...
What else is there to say... it will take some getting used to the new File Explorer though, but I think it will work out pretty well. The Windows Sidebar is something I will explore some more - I'm thinking of developing a couple of (hopefully) useful Gadgets just for fun if nothing else. The CPU/Mem meter is just beautiful, and the RSS feed viewer is pretty cool.
Oh, and all these security allowance elevation dialog thingys which keeps poping up all the time you want to start/remove/change stuff will have to go. If you've decided to be local admin on your box you don't want to keep saying yes, Yes, YES, YAHHH DARNIT! all the time. Once should be enough :)
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[Vista] What does Vista do when it Sleeps?
I have to say the new "power button" which puts Vista into the new "Sleep" mode seems nice. My 2 Ghz laptop (which doesn't have much on it yet I must admit) goes to sleep in 1 second and starts up in pretty much the same time. Superfast - I like it.
As I understand it, by default a laptop is put into sleep mode when the power button is pressed, then goes into hibernate (saves memory to disk) after a few hours or so, to save power. When resuming from hibernate it takes a bit longer for the box to get going, but that's understandable. It's possible to configure what happens when you press the power button or close the lid, also depending on if you're on battery or plugged in.
You can read more of what Vista does when it's in sleep mode on the Microsoft Vista Performance pages.
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[Vista] Is Sami the Default Swedish Language?
I had heard about this before, but someone had also said it was going to be fixed for beta 2. Looks like it wasn't because when I selected Sweden as my region, it defaulted to Sami, Lule (Sweden) as language :)
There were actually 3 different Sami dialects available; Lule, Northern and Southern, which is amazing in itself. I had no idea we had all these different versions of the Sami language... I can't remember seeing Finnish in that list though, but it should be.
Overall, the installation went really smooth, but I'm installing on the bare metal here, and not in VPC or Virtual Server. Graphic is stunning...
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[Vista] Beta 2 Available on MSDN Subscription
Guess I'm not the first to notice, but beta 2 of Vista is available for download to MSDN subscription owners. 3200 MB ISO :)
EDIT: There still (day after release) seems to be a problem with generating license keys for any other Vista version than the premium home edition. I guess we'll have to check back on the MSDN Subscription page every now and then and see if it gets fixed.
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[Vista] Vista VPC File Size
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[Vista] Testing Vista Feb CTP on VirtualPC
Today I installed the Feb CTP of Vista on my box at home, under VPC. The install was noticably faster than before, but even so took about an hour I think. I went out for a while, enjoying the spring sun, so I'm not sure exactly how long the install took.
After reading some advice on the Net, I installed the VMAdditions from the Virtual Server R2 program instead of the additions included in VPC. I don't know much of the difference, but performance in Vista is good enough to give it a real go. Just missing the Glass effects and sound is not working, but these are known issues.
The only thorn in my side right now is that I cannot get networking to work. I've seen some problems related to NAT and such, but I have to read up on it to see if it is related to my problems.
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[Vista] Virtual Vista Bloggers
An excellent way to test out a new operating system like Vista is to run it in a virtual machine, but some people run into problems installing and getting good performance out of it. The last days I've been reading posts from these two guys on the topic - Mikekol runs a blog called "Virtual Vista" which has several good posts about Vista on VPC and Virtual PC Guy blogs about... yes you guessed it!