Windows Vista...

Windows Vista Beta 2 was released last week and I am just now getting some free time to spend with migrating to it. I already installed it on a Toshiba laptop last week, but was less than impressed since all the bells and whistles GUI wouldn’t work on it even though it had an ATI 6100 series video card. But not giving up just yet… decided to take my Gateway desktop machine with an NVidia 7800 GT, 2 gig of RAM, 3gig dual core and a 500gig SATA II drive. You think that’ll be enough to run it? ;-)

I’ve finished the initial pass at the installation and waiting for the first game (gotta make sure at least one game works, right?). So while that is ticking away, I’ll fill you in on some of the details of the installation.

• Installed new hard drive (so I could keep the original one intact).
• Put the DVD in to start the install, couldn’t find the drive. :-(
• Put the old hard drive back in to run the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor.
• After seeing that I had an Intel SATA controller and was told to go to the manufacturers website, went there and created a drivers disc.
• Put the new hard drive back in and started the installation process again.
• When I got to the HD selection screen, clicked the drivers button to select a driver… soooooo much better than the F6 voodoo of the past. ;-)
• The installation process is pretty painless, watched it work it’s magic for a while.

Now that the initial installation was complete, it rebooted a few times and came up to the login screen. There’s a wizard that walks you through a few settings and then you have a desktop. In my case, it seemed smart enough to select the “native” resolution of the my monitor and didn’t ask me was it alright. Which is great since I didn’t have to tell it what it should have already known. ;-)

Now that I had a desktop, needed to get some sound. Of course the Audigy 2 card I had didn’t have drivers automatically installed; however, lucky enough that Creative had Vista drivers for download. Installed them and had to reboot. By default, the driver was set to stereo… when I found where to tweak it for 6.1, the sound was a bit garbled. Figured I would try to reboot and see what happens. After rebooting, the sound seems to be fine now.

Those reading my blog know that I have several machines on my desk that are controlled via a single keyboard and mouse using Multiplicity. Again, lucky enough, Stardock’s latest version of Multiplicity is Vista compatible now… though it would have been nice if they would have added me to some sort of notification list since I specifically asked them about when they would have one… but nonetheless, after upgrading all machines to the latest version of Multiplicity I can now continue working in the same manner as prior to the upgrade. (For what it’s worth, that’s how I’m typing this in right now.) There does seem to be some sort of bug with it… the mouse disappears every once and a while while switching between machines, but pressing CTRL+ESC appears to clear it up.

Installation of DDO finished and it appears that even though it tried to install DX9.0c, DX10 is still there. (whew). Also, DDO utilizes .NET 1.1 and that installation looks OK as well. Upon launching the game the first time, it processes the application folder for updates and complained with a somewhat ambiguous error. Since Vista now runs as a “user” by default, the application doesn’t have permission to modify the files in the application folder. It turns out that the Vista team has made what I think is a great improvement. For applications that want to run as “administrator”, there is a check box in the shortcut properties where you can have the application run as an administrator (on the Compatibility tab under Privilege Level). Once enabling that option, DDO launched and updated as expected.

First time getting into the DDO world looked a bit wonky; everything was extremely smoky and not very visible (the 3D portions, the 2D was just fine). After selecting the resolution I would normally run in, everything looks great. No time to play right now, need to install more stuff…

Next installation: Visual Studio 2005…