Windows Vista (Farewell Windows XP my trusty old friend)

[Viper007Bond]

Originally Posted by flyingfridge

Demo version runs until July 1 2007.

Wow! That's 13 months!

Anyway, I downloaded and burned it to a DVD last night. Now just to wait until later this week when I'm able to format.

(Can't do it before then as I gotta help my sister render her Maya project.)

[jensked]

flyingfridge, what kind of computer do you run it on? I'm just curious if I would be able to run it on an

Amd AthlonXP2600+
512mb ram (will upgrade to 1gb soon)
Radeon 9800Pro

And do you have trouble with normal things like:
- playing DVD/Divx
- office applications
- games????

/edit: downloading it now at 450kb/s...and they said something about a waiting cue? 8) I have to format my hd anyway (its broken, i'm getting a new one), so i will try to install both XP and Vista. on different partitions. Is that doable without too much ado?

[TechZ]

Originally Posted by jensked

flyingfridge, what kind of computer do you run it on? I'm just curious if I would be able to run it on an

Amd AthlonXP2600+
512mb ram (will upgrade to 1gb soon)
Radeon 9800Pro

And do you have trouble with normal things like:
- playing DVD/Divx
- office applications
- games????

/edit: downloading it now at 450kb/s...and they said something about a waiting cue? 8) I have to format my hd anyway (its broken, i'm getting a new one), so i will try to install both XP and Vista. on different partitions. Is that doable without too much ado?

The first day or two, it was quite overloaded, should be better now as you can see

My friend was getting 2.7MB (yes megabytes) off it yesterday, not bad.

[flyingfridge]

Originally Posted by jensked

flyingfridge, what kind of computer do you run it on? I'm just curious if I would be able to run it on an

Amd AthlonXP2600+
512mb ram (will upgrade to 1gb soon)
Radeon 9800Pro

And do you have trouble with normal things like:
- playing DVD/Divx
- office applications
- games????

/edit: downloading it now at 450kb/s...and they said something about a waiting cue? 8) I have to format my hd anyway (its broken, i'm getting a new one), so i will try to install both XP and Vista. on different partitions. Is that doable without too much ado?

My setup:

Intel P4 3.2 GHz (Northwood)
2GB RAM
Radeon X800XT PE

You'll want at least the GB of RAM. It will run with 512, but you don't get the snazzy aero interface. The X800XT handles the graphics perfectly, but it'd want to. DVD/DivX is perfect, I just installed the K-Lite codec pack and it's spot on. Office applications are also perfect, I use Office 2003, so as expected, Microsoft's products work perfectly with it. I'm not sure about games yet, I haven't got around to installing any. Been working flat out over the last couple of days.

[Raven18940]

You'll need at least a 40 gb hard drive, the install alone takes 12.7 gb and several hours. And 512 of ram is the minimum........good luck.

As for my vista, it's been teh suck. First mine hasn't been slow in a couple spots, it's moved about as fast as molasses the whole time. There are no drivers for my sound card that work and I can't figure out how to uninstall the drivers that don't work. And it's not some random, no name card either, it's a SB Audigy 4. The Nvidia drivers just flat out don't work right, though the microsoft ones do. But it's mostly the slowness of it all that's driving me mad. I have a screaming machine, AMD dual core with 2 gigs of ram and the thing takes almost 5 minutes to start. And most of this is down to the fact that Vista just seems to constantly accessing the hard drive. I have no idea what i's doing, but it's doing it a lot. Maybe it's the 900 megs of programs actively running in memory. I tried disabling the virtual memory and it's still slow. Though to be fair to vista it's had to sets of drivers that don't work and it hasn't crashed, which is not bad in my book. But yeah, this still needs a lot of work, a lot.

[zenkidori]

Originally Posted by Raven18940

Nah, that wouldn't do it, tried it already. What actually fixed it was making a dos boot disk and running fdisk to delete non-dos partitions.

Well it's installing now so we'll see what 64-bit computing is like.

there are way easier ways to do this, including several partition tools for use under linux and almost any fancy installer will do it as well.

The Linux Kernel has had 64bit support for a while...

[flyingfridge]

Originally Posted by Raven18940

You'll need at least a 40 gb hard drive, the install alone takes 12.7 gb and several hours. And 512 of ram is the minimum........good luck.

As for my vista, it's been teh suck. First mine hasn't been slow in a couple spots, it's moved about as fast as molasses the whole time. There are no drivers for my sound card that work and I can't figure out how to uninstall the drivers that don't work. And it's not some random, no name card either, it's a SB Audigy 4. The Nvidia drivers just flat out don't work right, though the microsoft ones do. But it's mostly the slowness of it all that's driving me mad. I have a screaming machine, AMD dual core with 2 gigs of ram and the thing takes almost 5 minutes to start. And most of this is down to the fact that Vista just seems to constantly accessing the hard drive. I have no idea what i's doing, but it's doing it a lot. Maybe it's the 900 megs of programs actively running in memory. I tried disabling the virtual memory and it's still slow. Though to be fair to vista it's had to sets of drivers that don't work and it hasn't crashed, which is not bad in my book. But yeah, this still needs a lot of work, a lot.

Dunno what's going on with yours, I'm has had no trouble installing, only took about an hour. The same as XP really. Starting on mine is way faster than XP was too....

I'm also finding that the more I use it, the happier it is getting. The slower spots have all but dissappeared and I haven't had any problems with performing any tasks for a while now. I couldn't use iTunes without sacrificing Aero Glass, so now I have winamp set up and brilliantly operational, my LDC++ client operates perfectly, as does Steam, Nero 6 (7 has an error on Vista), Photoshop, Office 2003, Limewire.

The World Poker Tour game encountered an error and won't work. Hope this doesn't provide a sign of what's to come with my games...

[jensked]

Originally Posted by flyingfridge

The World Poker Tour game

Sounds like a lot of action!

[frosty]

^

[Raven18940]

Originally Posted by flyingfridge

Dunno what's going on with yours, I'm has had no trouble installing, only took about an hour. The same as XP really. Starting on mine is way faster than XP was too....

I'm also finding that the more I use it, the happier it is getting. The slower spots have all but dissappeared and I haven't had any problems with performing any tasks for a while now. I couldn't use iTunes without sacrificing Aero Glass, so now I have winamp set up and brilliantly operational, my LDC++ client operates perfectly, as does Steam, Nero 6 (7 has an error on Vista), Photoshop, Office 2003, Limewire.

The World Poker Tour game encountered an error and won't work. Hope this doesn't provide a sign of what's to come with my games...

I've now that I've given it 10 minutes to finish booting things seem a lot nicer. I've already got firefox installed though. Now if I could just sort these damn audio drivers and have some sound.

[flyingfridge]

Day 3: I've just discovered how to use Flip 3D. Alt-Tabbing brings up a regular old style Alt-Tab method, but Windows Key + Tab brings up Flip 3D. It is so cool. Honestly, it's worth installing Vista just to see this at work.



See that movie in the foreground? That doesn't stop playing in Flip 3D. All windows remain live. Progress bars are up to date, movies play, Winamp scrolls and stuff. Viper's Avatar that you can see there keeps playing too! It is very very cool.

In other news, I've just spent the last hour playing Half Life 2. It worked without a glitch and performance was just as it was i windows XP. Which is mildly impressive given that i'm still just using the Microsoft-Issue drivers with my graphics card in Vista and in XP I had the latest ATi Issue drivers.

The copy/move/delete progress box has been given a touch up too. Now we get to see all the information including data remaining and transfer rate!

Originally Posted by jensked

flyingfridge,
/edit: downloading it now at 450kb/s...and they said something about a waiting cue? 8) I have to format my hd anyway (its broken, i'm getting a new one), so i will try to install both XP and Vista. on different partitions. Is that doable without too much ado?

Yeah that dual booting is easy. just set up your partitions, install XP first, Vista second as normal and Windows Setup will take care of the rest

[Viper007Bond]

I'd do that, but I can't make a partition as I don't wanna format my hard drive.

But assuming Vista works fine with all my programs and games, I'll just run it as my primary and not install XP anywhere, or make a small partition for XP just incase.

[andyhui01]

you can use partition magic.. you dont have to reformat

[Raven18940]

flyingfridge, that flip 3d looks so damn cool and I want to try it. Unfornately however i woke up and vista had shit itself in the night. Says I'm missing some file pxhlpa64.sys or something like that. I don't get it, it was running fine last night...well maybe not fine, but it worked.

WAIT, last known good configuration actually fixed it!!!!! That never worked with XP!!!

Now if only Promise would get off their lazy asses and write drivers for my RAID controller I'd be in business. And creative to write drivers for the audigy 4, but I've got sound now thanks to good ol onboard audio.

And Flip 3D is the most freakin awesome thing ever! Finally the windows key has a purpose! I'm doing it just to see the windows flip. WEEEEEEEE

EDIT: Ok, now that i've finally got sound I tried some video. At which point I noticed there's a definate issue with x86 program compatibility. Like winamp is using 10% of my cpu power and watching top gear was over 25%. Both these barely get my CPU off idle in XP. Oh well.

[flyingfridge]

are you using the x86 version or x64? my winamp doesn't use the CPU like that, and neither does playing top gear. Obviously from my system spec i'm on x86...

[Peter3hg]

Why am I getting this message.


Thank you for participating in the Microsoft Windows Vista Customer Preview Program.


You have received the maximum number of Product Keys available for this program.
Note: Windows Vista Beta 2 can be installed and activated on up to 10 PCs using with one Product Key.

[Raven18940]

Originally Posted by flyingfridge

are you using the x86 version or x64? my winamp doesn't use the CPU like that, and neither does playing top gear. Obviously from my system spec i'm on x86...

x64, not terribly impressed. I think I'm gonna reformat with the x86 version and give that a go.

Originally Posted by peter3hg2

Why am I getting this message.


Thank you for participating in the Microsoft Windows Vista Customer Preview Program.


You have received the maximum number of Product Keys available for this program.
Note: Windows Vista Beta 2 can be installed and activated on up to 10 PCs using with one Product Key.

Means they think they already gave you a product key, check the verification email they sent you.

[Blind_Io]

Originally Posted by MXM

If it ain't broken, don't fix it..

Still using win 2000 and I see no reason to even go to XP. Everything works

I agree, I am going to keep using XP Pro on all my machines as long as I can. Vista is going to go through a painful teething period of exploits, bugs and errors before it's really ready for the main stream. I am also worried about it being a system resource hog.

[Raven18940]

Originally Posted by Blind_Io

I agree, I am going to keep using XP Pro on all my machines as long as I can. Vista is going to go through a painful teething period of exploits, bugs and errors before it's really ready for the main stream. I am also worried about it being a system resource hog.

These are perfectly valid opinions, but this thread is for people who like being on the bleeding edge.