Vista Beta 2 Adventures
My desktop XP install has been getting steadily more and more crufty over the past 6 months or so. As well as the usual slow degradation of performance, it was displaying some quirky behaviour with settings not taking and various other niggles. I had made a mental note to reinstall at some point, but everytime I thought about it, I had that sinking feeling when I considered the pain of reinstalling all the apps and getting all the updates, drivers and what-not and so left it to fester for a bit longer.
On Friday I was browsing a few favourite tech websites, and was reminded that Vista had been given a second beta release, and one which was open to the public without too many hoops to jump through. Somehow the pain of reinstalling seemed more palatable in the context of checking out a new OS and so I decided to give it a shot. I have now got a working install, but in case anyone is attempting or about to attempt the same thing, I’ll list the problems:
Downloading — The machine I installed it on has an Athlon64 CPU. So, I naturally tried to get the 64-bit version of Vista. Unfortunately, this file is over 4 Gigabytes and this flummoxed my download managers (D4X, KDE Get, wget, all on FC4, 64-bit), which downloaded a file somewhat under 15 Megabytes instead. I’m sure you can get it to work on Linux and it may well even work without any problems on Windows, but I didn’t want to tie up a Windows machine downloading it and 64-bit support is probably worse than 32, so I grabbed the smaller 32-bit install instead. This came down at over 1 megabytes/second via wget, so I obviously missed the rush.
Burning — Hardly a Vista issue, but perhaps worth mentioning as a reminder. I had to burn the DVD twice as the first burn wouldn’t read reliably. Keep the ISO image until you know that the DVD you burned works!
Installing — First up, before I did anything, I imaged my C: drive and parked the image safely on another HD. With that done, I attempted an upgrade install of XP Pro. No dice. The installer wouldn’t go past a check on the drivers, complaining that the “DAEPRT SCSI Controller” driver needed updating. Seeing as I couldn’t find a driver for this specifically and updating my motherboard drivers didn’t change matters, I gave up on the upgrade install. Points to Vista for not destroying the XP install before finding the driver issue though.
Next, I booted from the DVD, formatted C: and tried an install from scratch. Everything was fine until the first reboot after which it showed the Windows “Cylon” load bar for a couple of seconds and then went to a black screen from which it never returned. Booting in safe mode got to loading “crcdisk.sys” and then it locked up. Googling brought up some info on problems with multiple OS installs causing this on other versions of Windows, but nothing directly relevant to my problem. I tried reinstalling a couple of times, providing some SATA drivers in case that was the problem, but with no luck.
I was just about to give it up when I came across a couple of posts mentioning that Vista had refused to install if they had two drives on their SATA controller. As it happened, the machine I was installing on had two HDs on one SATA controller, so as a last resort, I yanked the cable from my second HD and tried again. Success! And, even better, when I plugged the second HD into another SATA port, it worked too. It took the best part of a day and about half a dozen install attempts, but it does work.
In Operation
Multiple Monitors — The installed machine has two monitors hanging off a 6800GT. Vista recognised this on startup and offered some options to use the second monitor, which was great, except that almost immediately after setting them, it disabled my primary monitor for some reason and wouldn’t switch it back on. Adding to the annoyance was the fact that the display settings are nowhere to be found — right-click on the desktop doesn’t give them as an option like in XP and there is no Display Settings option in the Control Panel.
I’m presuming this is a bug, because if I go to help and search for display, I can get to a help page with a link to “Display Settings in Control Panel”, which opens up the familiar dialogue. Installing the nVidia drivers for Vista provides an nVidia option in the Control panel, which allowed me to activate both monitors again and set them up as dualview, but there is no individual resolution and refresh rate etc. setting in there. I have managed to get the dual monitors working as I want, but the setting has been lost a couple of times, requiring me to go back to the nVidia panel and then back through help to reset the windows display settings.
Installing Software – By default, Vista has something called “User Account Control” switched on. This seems to be something along the lines of user and group based security as in Linux, and brings up prompts asking for permission for programs to start other programs and access services etc. It’s all a very nice idea, but is something of a pain in practice at the moment as you feel like these prompts are constantly interrupting you when you are trying to use the computer. Even worse, it breaks the install of some apps: Acronis TrueImage wouldn’t install until I switched it off and so off it went and off it has stayed.
Sound — My Creative Audigy 2 doesn’t work. The onboard Realtek AC’97 stuff does. Bad driver support from Creative is nothing new though. I’m sure they’ll get around to it at some point. Some people have got the beta 1 Audigy drivers to work, so YMMV.
Aero — It’s pretty, I particularly like the black glass effect taskbar. The 3D task switcher is kind of groovy, but not that useful. The (wi)gadget sidebar is a neat, if unoriginal, idea that is poorly served by the anaemic gadgets that are available.
On the other hand, it’s very glitchy. Lots of screen blinking, odd highlighting of icons, occasional halting of visual updates and partially disappearing windows. All things that happen in dodgy XP installs currently, but not in fresh, clean ones. It could be the nVidia drivers I guess, but some of the bigger and more disconcerting problems leave me questioning if this is really going to be ready in 6 months time. On a couple of occasions the system has appeared to hard-lock, with the mouse pointer stopping dead. That normally means the machine needs a hard power-cycle, but it has recovered after 10 seconds or so. Scary stuff.
Summary — Despite the problems, I’m going to stick with it for a while. I’ve installed the MS Office 2007 beta as well, so MS is providing me with a lot of free software in return for the annoyances. I don’t use the desktop as much as my laptop, so I’m not too concerned if things don’t work properly. Hopefully, we’ll see some fixes for the glitching come through fairly rapidly and seeing as the beta key is good until June 2007, this should see me through to my next upgrade.
For reference, here is a more detailed rundown of the PC I installed it on:
- Athlon64 3400+
- 1GB RAM
- MSI K8N Neo Platinum Motherboard
- Creative Audigy 2ZS
- Leadtek 6800GT
