Windows Vista Beta 2 - Day 1

I recently read an article where it was mentioned that Vista Beta 2 is having a lot of trouble installing, and a lot of trouble with device driver compatibility. Being the glutton for punishment that I am, I grabbed the beta and installed it on my Tablet PC as a clean install. The installation took about 3 hours from start to finish, but I think it spent a lot of time reading data from my relatively slow DVD drive.. Tablets (at least the ones I've used) have notoriously slow CD/DVD devices - it keeps the cost down and the heat/battery consumption down as well.

What I expected:

• My video card would not be recognized
• My touchpad device would not be recognized
• My pen/stylus for the tablet would not be recognized
• My monitor would not be recognized
• My audio card would not be recognized

Actually, I expected a lot worse. When I installed the previous beta of VIsta on my Alienware PC, I got nothing but a black screen - a completely hardware compatibility failure. Here's what happened:

• Video card was recognized, though only at 32MB instead of the 128MB actual. There is no current update from Nvidia on the GeForce Go card
• Touchpad works
• Pen/stylus works like a champ, Vista Ultimate even detected that its a tablet PC and gives me access to the Tablet PC Input Panel
• Monitor showed up as Generic PnP
• Audio card was not recognized (no surprise here), However - I plugged in a plantronics USB headset and it works like a champ
• I've lost access to portrait mode/landscape mode switching. I'm sure thats because I'm not using an Acer OEM of Vista

The system is screaming fast compared to previous builds, and I don't notice the unnecessary heat-up that some people have complained about on Vista running on laptops. I can get all of the graphical goodies with my "not quite there" 32MB driver except for transparent glass... And while transparent glass is fancy and looks really nice - I found I turned it off after a couple of days anyway - and I can still get transparency everywhere that it counts, like the sidebar.

Sidebar gadgets are quite cool, especially considering they're nothing but HTML and JavaScript - an unsurprising move from Microsoft. I remember "back in the day" when the sidebar actually contained WPF/XAML tidbits - and the performance of the sidebar was so horrible that it got yanked from a subsequent build. With nothing more than HTML and JavaScript, the sidebar is fast, lightweight, and only takes up about 20MB of RAM (previous on took up 100MB).

Tablet/Ink support is fantastic. My handwriting is pretty pathetic, and I would never bother with recognition in the XP version of my Tablet - I would just take native handwriting notes in OneNote and leave them in native handwriting. The recognition on Vista is fast and extremely accurate. It actually recognizes a lot of my chicken-scratch that would previously give Windows XP Tablet Edition fits.

The only thing left for me to do is install Visual Studio 2005, WinFX SDK, and the "Orcas" extensions and get crankin' on some Vista/WPF code.

Did I mention that I'm extremely pleased that sidebar gadgets are nothing more than JavaScript and HTML? :)

The only real complaint that I have is that blasted dialog that keeps coming up telling me that administrator credentials are required in order to perform an action. As a developer, I know exactly why this dialog comes up - and Windows Vista is twice as secure as Windows XP because of it... But I can also guarantee that your average user is going to be frustrated by it, and most of the people who use computers just for e-mail and occasional surfing are going to be downright confused by that dialog.

Update: I downloaded the Acer Tablet PC Buttons driver from Acer's Website, even though it said it was for Windows XP. I now have the ability to change orientation on my tablet PC - so it is a fully functioning, Vista-enabled Tablet PC. And One-Note 2007 on this Tablet is VERY cool.

tags: vista  tablet  beta  

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