Calling all Vista32 & Vista64 users -your thoughts.

Want to hear from other Vista users. I have both Vista 32 and Vista 64 on a new HD (WD 80 gig SATA). Vista 64 was much more difficult to get drivers for. However I finally got a beta anti virus on each OS. Trend Micro beta for Vista 32 and Avast freeware on Vista 64. Sound drivers for my Audigy2 ZS were a major pain but after MUCH experimentation and luck both OS have the soundcard working. Finally, my Logitech Communicator STX webcam was another major pain, but, again after many attempts I could get the drivers installed so it works with Messenger Live beta

Office 2007 beta really looks good in Vista. Works very well. IE 7 comes with Vista so using it allows me to learn its nuances. All in all, the more I use Vista the more its growing on me. It's obviously not polished code. It is functional however. Since I have an AMD 64 CPU (3700 SanDiego) its fun to run a true 64 bit OS. Drivers and programs are much tougher to install, however.

Anyone using it?

Im using the 32 bit version, build 5384. visually i love it. the look, layout and the way it operates so far is really nice.

so far it has been rock solid stable and has performed really well. drivers have been a minor nuisance but its beta....no biggie. im not crazy about IExplorer though. i do like the tabs and the look but the menu's arent customizable as they used to be. i used to love the ability to drag, drop and alter them all, placing them all on the same menu bar. its one reason i never switched to firefox.

one other thing iv'e noticed that im concerned about is that no matter how hard i try to lock vista out of my main XP OS. it easilly can gain access to it. ive tried everything i can think of and vista can overide my attempts to segregate it, and it does it with simple button clicks.

more to come.....

I don't like it (Vista 32-bit). All it really seems like to me is a pretty GUI update to XP and nothing more.

It's a little more unstable than XP is, temporarily freezing up if so much as a half dozen windows are open. I tend to see black windows often while Windows is scrambling to redraw it.

Also the user access protection thinger is nothing more than a sheer nuisance. It pops up when perfectly normal background processes start up (Virus protection) and only pops up when you're accessing anything inside Windows. No games, no applications, just something as simple as the control panel. While I like the idea that they're trying to protect dumb people from doing dumb things, I'm sure they'll just click 'Continue' or flat-out disable it because they're annoyed like crazy about it.

Drivers aren't very fun either, but since it's beta that's completely understandable. Though it was a huge PITA trying to install a simple video driver, if I were to install it straight out of the box (no uninstall/safe mode) my video would lock up and I'd have to restart. If this was in XP I would have had no problem just clicking on the installer without doing anything.

I like how Windows Update is done in an app all by itself instead of slogging through IE, makes things a bit quicker. Games also work just fine and often don't need the compatiability modes.

I was expecting more than an imitation of OS X. If I want OS X, I'll get a Mac thank you.

Well, I'll try and edit this post with a detailed "feeling" of vista shortly. At the moment I have to be somewhere, but I definitely want to toss my 2 cents into the ring.

*Edit:

Hmm...

Thoughts on the Vista experience? All of my thoughts are based off of testing on my main rig which has the following specs:

Testbed:
AMD Athon X2 4400+ @2.5GHz (250x10)
2GB G.Skill PC4400 3-4-4-8
DFI Lanparty NF4-Ultra D motherboard
eVGA 7800GTX 256MB DDR3 PCIe video card
Soundblaster X-Fi Xtrememusic sound card
Onboard LAN
200GB Seagate SATA primary hdd (XP x64 Install and storage partitions)
40GB Seagate IDE secondary drive (Vista 32, Vista x64 installs on even partitions)
BenQ 1640 DVD-RW
Lite-On CD-RW

Installation:
The DOS-free installer is nice, and it makes things go much smoother. I also really like the disk-management tool in the installer. (As I've already mentioned.) Along with the ability to install drivers via USB flash drives and other media, the whole interface for installation is much more modern and streamlined than the older half DOS/half GUI affair from XP. The only complaint that I have is that you cannot manually describe where drivers are located. (For example, on a different hard drive, in a certain folder, etc.) You can only tell it where to look (USB Flash Drive) and it will search it. Depending on how well it's search functions, this could be a problem for full USB drives, like my 2GB one. (I keep a lot of files on it.)

The fact that 99% of all LAN chipsets are supported out of the box, and that it will automatically pick up an IP (if you use DHCP on your networK) and download the patches during installation is definitely something worth noting. While I will still prefer a slipstreamed DVD to this (ever since I discovered slipstreaming, I'm nigh addicted to it), this is a good solution for someone installing for the first time. It means that when your computer finally boots, it is up-to-date. That's a big deal. Sure, the install might take longer, but it's worth it.

Initial boot and final setup are straightforward, but takes much longer than the traditional XP setup. (After installtion it was a quick boot to the desktop.)


First Impressions User Interface

I suppose we should start at the beginning, which is a screen I never see on XP. The login screen. It's cleaner than the XP one, and the layout is very clear. The ease of password typing (for the dominant personality/user) is great. The controls off to the side for power is nice too. It all feels very smooth. The part that has a severe hiccup is the "fade" from the login screen to the desktop. It's not quite as smooth as it could be. It also takes much longer (initially, more on that later) to get to the desktop.

I have only experienced one major flaw in the OS, and that's the CD/DVD burning capability built in. This was under x64, and I haven't had a chance to try it it in 32 bit Vista. It locked the system when trying to burn a CD. I was able to recover from it though, which I guess says something for overall stability, even if the feature is buggy.

The 3D acceleration so far isn't really where I expected it to be. The "eye candy" features actually have some use, like the small previews on the taskbar and in the ALT+TAB menu, but the "transparent" windows are just pretty, but not useful. Now please note, this doesn't surprise me too much. Aside from being a beta, we are also not using DX10 yet. DX10 not only increases stability within the 3D environment, it is also more efficient in handling multiple simultaneous 3D tasks. I'm still not sure how much of it is being offloaded though. An interesting trick is to start the task manager widget, erm, gadget and then move your mouse from the desktop to the sidebar and back, and watch the jump in CPU resources. I can't quite explain what is happening there, but it is extremely repeatable, so it's not just a one time glitch.

Surprisingly, I was happy with the initial choice of theme for the OS. The dark muted tones didn't quite cause the "Holy good God I need to change this NOW" reaction that I got after first booting XP. This alone may have made me more comfortable with the new OS. It's a small thing, but worth noting.

Gadgets. Let's get it out of the way. These are *nix widgets. Period. If anyone claims they are Mac based, remember that even Mac is based off of a *nix variant, and thus owes its heritage to the venerable OS. They've been around for years, but Windows is finally embracing them this time around. The ones they have are just OK. A mini task manager "gauge" cluster, the calculator (most useful one for me so far), analog clock. Those are the ones I use. The ones I really want would be a Speedfan cluster, monitoring temps and voltages, and a CPU-ID one for monitoring cpu speed, memory speed etc. Finally, I could personally do with a nice calander one. I use a 3rd party app now to display a desktop calander in the corner of my screen, and I think this would be an ideal widget to include. At first, I thought they did, but apparently I was wrong.

The "search" field in the Windows menu doubles as your run command. This took a little getting used to, and definitely highlights when you misspell something. I typed in notpead instead of notepad, and was immediately transported to the search window.

The indexing is better than XP, and actually seems to work the way it is supposed to. Upon moving files and/or updating them, add/removing them, etc. It's near realtime updates to the index. This makes it infinitely more useful than the XP version, which for me never seemed to update, rendering it useless.

Those nagging User Access Warnings... Most of them are one time affairs. If you have to continually do something that requires Administrator access, they become annoying fast. The whole screen fades, similar to the shutdown behavior in XP. It pretty much stops everything when this happens. If you have apps running in the background, they are temporarily halted. Not the best thing. Now I have left them on, simply to see what the typical user will see. Overall, as I said, most of them are one timers. After that, they don't pop up. The result? A much more secure OS with only a few days of annoyance. For power users however, they are much more likely to be an issue.

Performance:
OK, probably what most of you care about it. Obviously I have a decent system. It's not bleeding edge, but it's fast enough. Even so, during the intial few boots, you will feel like Vista is DOG SLOW. Without optimization, Vista seems to be extremely bogged down. Part of this is the steps it takes to allow XP programs to run properly, without administration rights. Part of it is beta code. A lot of it is bloat programming.

But there is an upside to this. After about 3 consecutive boots while doing typical tasks, a strange thing happened... Vista loads to the desktop almost immediately, and the common apps launch nigh-instantly as well. This is the prefetcher at work. In case you don't remember much about the new features, in an attempt to be like Mac OSX in some ways, Vista has the ability to optimize the OS so that the most common tasks are cached to memory during boot time. It also has the ability to optimize drive access to accelerate these tasks when they aren't in memory. Despite being skeptical, I can say that this seems to work the way it is advertised.

I was a little disconcerted upon my first boot of x64 to see 1GB of RAM being used. But after a consecutive boot, it wasn't nearly as bad, only 700MB. This is a resource hungry OS, but don't start screaming bloatware. It actually uses the resources it allocates, and from what little testing I've done so far, is more efficient at handling resources than XP ever was. This is a good thing. The OS does not "expand" to use all available resources. It takes what resources it needs, and then stops. This is quite impressive from a Windows OS. At least to me.

Finally, it should be noted that the new integrated TCP/IP stack that supports simultaneous IPv4 and IPv6 connections is very efficient. Much more efficient than my XP x64 stack to be sure. This was tested using a fileserver on my network that is all gigabit rated. Average transfer speed increased by 10%, which is impressive. Even more so because I thought it was the hard drives at either end that were the bottlenecks, but apparently not.

Anti-Virus
Usability seems to be pretty solid. Avast Antivirus' latest free Home offerings are both Vista 32 and x64 compliant, and use one universal installer. This is a definite correct approach in the attempt to get people to try Vista out. Don't make things that require Vista specific installers, instead make a universal install program that will install on anything from Win98SE to Vista x64. Kudos to them for making that part at least very easy.

Internet Explorer 7
Wow. I.e. done right. This browser is fast. Faster than Firefox. Faster than Opera. Faster than IE7 under XP. It's fast. Maybe it's just a new method of rendering being used, or that it finally is supporting CSS to a much greater extent than IE6, or maybe it's something else entirely. But if you ever want the effect that all of your pages are instantly loading, try it out. It seems to render the entire page at once, in just a second or two. I've never really seen anything like it, and I can't really explain it, yet. I'm still researching the changes that have been made.

Wow, I guess there will be another post. This one is too long. lol

Miscellaneous:
The boot loader. As you may or may not know, Microsoft has completely redone their bootloader. They have gone to the BCD, or Boot Configuration Data file. This is a small database of devices that can be edited to add/remove rename, etc. bootable devices, as well as other features. This also means that there are issues with multiple OS systems. At this point in time, I have not yet figured out how to get it to boot multiple OS's from disparate hard drives. The instructions on Microsoft's website only work for multiple OS's on the same drive. I'll keep trying to figure this out, and I'll edit my post in the other thread about multi-booting if I do. One major thing this bootloader allows is for multiple kernels to be booted. This means that for the fist time, Windows users can tweak, modify, and test new kernels without breaking their entire Windows installtion.

Conclusion:
Overall, it's a good test bed, but there are definitely things that don't seem to work right "out of the box". As others have mentioned, Vista x64 once again seems like an afterthought of its 32-bit brethren. Creative's drivers don't work in x64 Vista, which is a disappointment, as I was really looking to do my primary testing in that version of the OS. This is unfortunate state of affairs, as Vista (all versions) seem to be willing to take advantage of whatever hardware you can throw at them, including as much RAM as you can give them. (Imagine being able to cache your current favorite game in RAM for nigh-instant loading.) Most of the features that I've been following work as originally stated, which is in and of itself impressive. prefetching, memory caching, 3D acceleration (to the extent possible) are all there. The features are all there, and a lot of work has been done on the backend to produce a better user experience. But still more work needs to be done to get the overall package ready for the mainstream public and to be a final product.


Sorry for the overly long posts. But you asked for my impressions, and my impressions aren't exactly coherent. ;)

Excellent job James. I hope to got to a 4600 dual core when the price drops. How does the dual core run under Vista? I assume both cores are recognized.

Your impressions were thorough and helpful. I'm having trouble with windows update in Vista 32. Keep getting error codes.

It's pretty smooth. I still get some glitches, but I think that is more driver/OS interface issues on the graphics side of things.

I definitely will never go back to single core though. Everything is smoother with dual core. :)

I dont like the start menus all programs botton i want to expand like in xp and not go into the friggen explorer type thing. :mad: :mad:

x64 has become a coaster :D Just like XP Pro x64 -- tons of driver issues!
Overall I give Vista an 8 out 10. My main beef is Explore for file/folders -- I do not like the new interface. Is there a way to set it to the XP-style? More later ...

im running vista 32bit right now.. its alright, im getting used to it. My only issue with it is that, my hard drive seems to ALWAYS be spinning which is really annoying and concerns me, right now as i type this i only have ie opened and its spinning away.. anyone having this problem?

Folding@Home 5.03 GUI version working OK so far. More later ...

I'm still having trouble with Windows Update. I get error codes. :mad:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gkline

I'm still having trouble with Windows Update. I get error codes. :mad:

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Hmmmm, I've had no problems with Windoze Update. Perhaps a reinstall??? Or maybe just reinstall Windoze Update -- but don't ask me how :D

My sound keeps going out. I'll minimize a window then go back and no more sound.

I keep having to replug my mouse in to get it to work after boot up.

Here's a pic of my desktop so far. You can see that F@H is running and ASUS Probe II. Note upper right hand corner, a CPU and memory usage gadget in the side bar.

https://www.sharkyforums.com/images/...2006/06/15.jpg

If I do get 3 monitors, I'm very tempted to install Vista on my PC so I can put gadgets and other cool things on the third monitor.

Well, I just found out yet another interesting fact about the whole BCD thing...

I needed at least one of the partitions on my spare drive to update my Windows XP Pro install CD. Every few months I slipstream it with all of the latest patches, so that the downloads required to have a fully patched OS are minimal to none.

After getting past the formatting and copying stage...

It won't boot.

So thinking it might be an issue with Vista/non-Vista partitions on the same hdd, I formatted the complete drive using Quick NTFS.

After initial install and file copy it still won't boot.

So what do you think might be the cause?

Yup, you guessed it. the new Boot loader from Vista will not allow itself to be overwritten by Windows XP.

I'm now in the process of trying a slow format (thankfully it's only 40GB) to see if I can purge the damn thing once and for all. If not, I'm going to install Linux, as I know it will purge that goofy bootloader. Or at least I hope...

::fingers crossed::

I'll update with news.

*Edit: Disturbingly enough, still no luck. I have done a complete working install of Linux, but upon reformatting and trying a Windows install I still get an "Error Loading Operating System" after the initial setup/file copy. I have tried it with my slipstreamed XP, my clean XP disc, my slipstreamed x64, and my clean x64 disc. I have also tried another spare hdd I have lying around, and it works fine. So as of now, I am finding that the new bootloader will bork a drive for a "legacy" windows install. I'll keep searching, and see if anyone has run into this/fixed it. Looking back through dyne's thread about "properly removing Vista" I guess I'll try a fixmbr next.

*Edit: Fixmbr didn't work either. I can't figure out what is wrong. The OS's install just fine on another disk, and Linux will install just fine on this hard drive, but Windows XP will not install on the hard drive that Vista was on. tres weird.

James, thanks forr the update. Vista keeps surpising us!

I tried it out on a spare 80gb drive,and I like the interface still checking it out.
So far i have not been able to get the 64 bit version.

I bought both DVDs from MS.

I think i want build 5456 and not this one but microsoft is ***.

Weedkiller420: Why build 5456?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by gkline

Weedkiller420: Why build 5456?

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