Life in Vista-land (32-bit)
It's no news that Vista Beta 2 has gone public last week.
I got hold of a copy of Build 5384 on Friday and have been playing with it incessantly.
After installing the OS, I realised that I had made the cardinal mistake of not ensuring all drivers were available. Thankfully, the nForce4 NIC driver had installed successfully making the lack of drivers an annoyance.
My first reaction was that it's considerably faster than Build 5308 (Feb CTP). This could be owing to the RAM upgrade since then (went from 1 to 2 GB).
Most thankfully, the LUA has become less intrusive. Although file operations (in certain system folders) are still at the annoyance phase, it's become a necessary evil. I actually quite like the idea, to be honest. I've not been hard-enough on myself to use a non-administrator account, but should be doing that soon.
Joining a Windows 2003 domain seemingly proved no issue, as it was with the Feb CTP.
The most noted thing was the amount of RAM being used: 623MB upon boot time. Disabling Aero yields a 591MB utilization.
Eventually I got hold of my Soundcard drivers and obtained updated nForce Drivers. Music returned to the Windows Experience, enlightening the mood. The Creative Control Panel was noticibly absent, but the drivers are more than 6 months old.
A most welcome addition is the "More Details"-ed copy window, providing a speed monitor. Sadly, even after 88.61 Vista Geforce drivers, the Aero-specific Task Switcher still has "jaggies" to my dismay.
And "the only improved feature" doesn't seem to exist: The Red-Screen of Death seemed quite black and white. A photo will accompany the 64-bit review in the next two days. It was forced (blanking the partition with Vista). The bootloader continued to work (booting Windows XP), which is more than I can say for most Linux distributions using LILO.
The scariest moment was the 1791MB memory usage noted yesterday. But since it's Beta code, it can surely be forgiven :) And I haven't considered the inner kernel workings yet. More post-64-bit-review work :)
Regards,
Strauß