Vista RC2 Experiences
The spam-bots have reminded me that I haven’t posted in a while. So here’s a post to shake them off.
I’ve been using Vista RC2 since a few days after it came out, and it’s holding up pretty well. It installed with none of the problems I had with the previous beta I tried. The major issues I’ve had are with the drivers for my graphics (nVidia 6800GT) and sound (Audigy 2 ZS) cards. The sound card drivers seem to work fine, but the beta licencing is pretty annoying in that they have timed out, forcing a reinstall and they’re going to time out again in January. This seems unnecessarily restrictive, even if it does force people to upgrade (what if I’m not connected to the internet when they time out?). The graphics drivers were in worse shape, causing odd desktop behaviour where the signal to the monitor would shut off entirely when the Vista account security kicked in. Worse, when playing Company of Heroes, significant rendering errors would occur that remained when I returned to desktop and needed a reset to cure. The latest nVidia Vista drivers seem to have resolved these issues though.
Talking of the security, it does seem a little less annoying in that it doesn’t ask you for permission as much. It still causes problems when installing a number of apps though. This would be fine, except that turning it off requires a system restart. Unless you’re addicted to installing everything you lay your hands on, I doubt this will be a real problem in use, but the average user will probably blame the app for the installation failure, so I can understand why some companies are concerned about increasing support calls.
I’ve had a few oddities with Media Player where I can’t click on it to get focus and get it to go full screen. Some random clicking on other windows seems to wake the focus management up and it’s no big deal, but it does suggest that there are still a few wrinkles in the UI code to be ironed out.
Apart from that it has been fine. I’ve played some games on it (Company of Heroes, IL2 (OpenGL), Half-Life 2, Defcon) and they all work with the newer drivers, although I’m sure they’re a touch slower than on XP. I’ve also installed Python and some libraries and had the machine running scripts for several days without any issues. It has fewer foibles than my Ubuntu install and it is currently an effectively free OS, so no complaints from me. I only wish I had bought some MS stock before the recent earnings announcement, because I expect them to have a great 2007 on the back of the Vista launch barring catastrophes.
