My initial installation problems on Friday night was due to the extraction program that I used which truncates the long filenames to 8 characters. That causes the installation to throw a "Setup Loader" error everyime I run it. After realising the problem, I mounted the .iso file as a virtual drive and everything works fine.
Gettin' Started With Vista!
I did not install Windows Vista on a Virtual Machine but installed it directly on a separate partition on my notebook. The installation takes approximately 45 minutes, going through two reboots and the final configuration. Steps that require human interaction have been drastically reduced in the installation and I'm very happy with that. The screens also looks better now.
After the installation, I went on to configure the drivers for my notebook. My first attempt to use the drivers that comes with the .iso was futile. I guessed I must have corrupted the driver store and since then, no drivers can be installed. I reinstalled the whole thing again this morning and used the drivers that came with HP Compaq. Everything works fine now.
However, I noticed that the Aero Glass interface was not enabled. I immediately went to ATI's web-site but there were no updated Catalyst Drivers for my graphics card and their new drivers for Windows Vista beta 1 does not contain the drivers for my card either. To my disappointment, I discovered Radeon 9200 doesn't support DirectX 9 and therefore won't be able to support the Aero Glass interface. I need atleast a Radeon 9600 to experience the new Aero Glass interface with all those transparent and translucent effects.
I will have to stick to the plane Aero interface. By the way, Aero stands for Authentic, Energetic, Reflective and Open. But I prefer the previous Slate interface better. Anyway, as long as it can run on 1280 x 800, I'm happy!
I won't be providing a lengthy review since I believe almost every web-site out there have been posting reviews on the OS. One of them is Winsupersite. You can read all about it there. So far, I have encountered several crashes and have been sending crash reports to Microsoft but the crashes are no big deal, the system is still up and running.
One feature I find very amusing with Windows Vista is the speech recognition. I have been playing with it for the whole afternoon, training it to recognise my voice. Hopefully, I don't have to type my blogs anymore in the near future ;) One thing I noticed is that IE7 runs ok on this as compared to running on WindowsXP. There were no lags. Also, the OS seems to boot faster than WindowsXP (Probably I have not installed any applications on it yet).
I will be installing Visual Studio 2005 on it next as I would love to try out XAML in the Windows Presentation Foundation. That's the new name for Avalon, and Indigo has also been renamed to Windows Communications Foundation. To start developing, you can checkout the new Windows Vista Developer site. A lot of useful resources there.
Ok, before I go, here are some screen shots I took on my notebook.
The new Start Menu, Windows Explorer and Control Panel
Internet Explorer 7 (Tabs!!!) and Windows Explorer
Media Player and Windows Explorer Showing Pictures.
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