Vista 5728 available but for limited time and with limitations

[mitchelln]

It still does not have drivers for Nvidia RAID and I notice that the RAID driver has mysteriously disappeared from the Nvidia RC1 driver download. Gawd knows what's going on. With RAID-0 so prevalent now this does seem daft. It still insists on zapping your disk partitions with little warning as well. Probably to kill any Linux installs you may already have
Is Microsoft gonna let it go out like this?

[starbuck]

Got Longhorn to tinker with too.

forgive me if I'm being stupid but aren't longhorn and vista the same thing(thought they'd changed the name a while ago).

[Nikumba]

Having installed and tested 5728 I can say it is a leap forward. It is quick and nippy, sitting at desktop the ram usage is dowen to about 200Mb which is better than the early betas.

Few things didnt work, and some odd things, but MS are really doing well with the code optimisations and tweaks.

Call me old fashion but I would love a return of the 98 what to install box, as its a pain to go round at the end to add or rmeove bits you need. It shouldnt be that hard to give the user a typical or custom install but it might turn up.

Aero is much much quicker now, barely any lag noticable in it whatso ever

Will i buy the full version? I dont know yet, will have to see how much better it is than XP when finally released

[starbuck]

It's been quicker for me as well(but only after I reinstalled the latest nvidia driver). Get the odd little slow down but should be better in a few days once it's had a chance to settle down a bit.

[digit]

forgive me if I'm being stupid but aren't longhorn and vista the same thing(thought they'd changed the name a while ago).

Longhorn is now the code name for the latest windows server OS

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserv...n/default.mspx

[Clunk]

ive tried everything, and neither the 32 or 64 bit versions will boot in my pc's. im redownloading them now.

bad media, or bad burn, seems to be working now

[Bob Crabtree]

Finally got round to installing this on my main PC (after disconnecting the boot drive and connecting a spare, of course).

This is an Athlon 64 3200+ (Clawhammer) with an ATI Radeon AiW 9600 Pro (128MB) running on a Gigabyte GA-K8VNXP motherboard and with 2GB of RAM.

First impressions:

1/ All a bit Fisher-Price (but I think that's how I always feel first time out with a new-gen OS). Also, of course, I felt a bit at sea cos so many things are done or accessed slightly differently from XP.

2/ One hard disk not accessible (SATA). When I tried to see what was going on using Disk Manager, I was invited to (as I recall) partition the disk to make it usable even before Disk Manager's main screen came up. Naturally I declined. And when I returned to XP, it was there as normal. I'm guessing this prob is something to do with SATA drivers and the fact that I'm booting from PATA but, for now it's not a big problem.

One unhappy consequence of this, however, was that was when I checked out the Sata disk back under XP Pro (just to see if there was anything even slightly untoward), I stupidly marked it as Active by mistake.

Fortunately, I had Partition Magic 8 installed, so was able to set up a two-step action - Hide, then Unhide - which stopped it from being Active. Not sure if leaving it Active would have prevented the PC from booting but I wasn't going to take any chances.

I would be keen to know if anyone has a safe and easy alternative method of stopping an disk being active cos I couldn't see any such thing when I searched for it in XP's built in help or on the net.

3/ Aero worked okay and, amazingly (well, to me) Vista had automatically borrowed some system RAM (the PC has 2Gigs) to boost the video RAM from 128MB to (as I recall) 256MB. I thought that WAS an impressive feat, though might not have felt the same way if the PC had less RAM (though perhaps, Vista wouldn't have borrowed it then or would have borrowed less)

However, I couldn't find the stacked screens view that I remember being shown some months back in a MS demo. Do I have to throw a switch somewhere to get this or has it been removed?

4/ No sound - even though Device Manager tells me it's all working. I haven't though, fiddled to see if plugging the speakers into a different socket makes any difference. Sound was working just fine - before and after - in XP, so I'm not sure that this is going help (but there are lots of output sockets and, maybe one will work under Visa when another doesn't)

5/ Reasonably fast booting up and very quick when closing down - but I'm making a comparison with the machine running under XP with a huge number of apps installed and lots of background tasks likely to be slowing things down.

6/ My Canon Pixma 780 multi-function's printer capabilities were automatically recognised - but, really, I ought to check and see if I can do an install of its full software suite.

7/ An old Dazzle SD/MMC card reader that I use all the time under XP wasn't recognised and I couldn't find any XP drivers for it on the net (doing things that way is often quicker than looking through drawers of drivers CDs). And it now seems not to be recognised under XP (hopefully a reboot will sort that or moving it to another port - cos I messed around switching it between two USB sockets and might have it in the 'wrong' one - and WTF do you have to install USB drivers again if you connect something into a different USB port? That's not what happens with FireWire)

Apart from just spend more time hands on - and trying to do some real work under Vista - I'm not sure what to do to try to give it a good work out.

The main thing I thought to try was install a bunch of software, principally:

The new MS Office beta
Firefox
FileZilla
Some image-editing apps
WinZip (not yet seen how good or otherwise Vista's built in zip-handling is)

But, I would welcome any other suggestion on how to give it a good work out.

[8bit]

Has MS pulled the RC2 download? I only see RC1 listed on the Microsoft page now...

[starbuck]

yeah, they pulled it down after a few days of it being up. Only place you can get it is really on torrent now.

[d0nson]

was there ever any reason giving as to why the pulled RC2 (build 5744) of the web?

I was able to download it from the MS side before it vanished and have been using it as my primary (only) OS for 10 days now. I think it's a substantial improvement over RC1, if not for simply the fact that I'm able to install on my raid-0 setup

[d0nson]

hehe, nevermind, the answer was in the forum beneath this one

I agree with the sentiment expressed in the forum that MS didn't really want too many people to have a pre-release version of Vista that is as stable and polished (lose terms) as build 5744 on their computers..

Forum -> 'Final' beta version of Vista (RC2 build 5744) available

[Tom|Nbk]

posting from rc2 right now really liking vista and finding my way around all the little features it definetly feels more solid than XP but im definetly leaving it a good while before i do upgrade to Vista as XP is just to damn good atm, dx10 dosn't attract me one bit yet either.

[atmadden]

I too have RC2 installed in dual boot mode. I do find it hard to find some menus tho such as finding folder options to show hidden files. Took me ages to find this in the end had to use search. Seems the only way to find certain things. Also avg free edition worked under RC1 but is now incompatible with RC2???

[charleski]

I do find it hard to find some menus tho such as finding folder options to show hidden files. Took me ages to find this in the end had to use search.

This is the central problem with Vista as a whole. The user interface is broken and search is not a good replacement.