Vista Ultimate Beta 2- first thoughts

[mohaughn]

OK. I was able to use mozilla's download manager to dl the vista 2 beta from MS without any problems.

I burnt the DVD at 8x, and set my bios to load the DVD drive first.

Reboot the system, get an error about no boot environment available. System boots into Mandriva linux.

Go back into the bios, set the DVD as the only bootable device. Same error.

Disable APIC support on the BIOS, boot DVD. It loads. I have no idea why I couldn't get the DVD to load with APIC enabled. Right now I'm using Vista still without APIC enabled. My Win2k partition will only boot with APIC enabled. I'm going to mess around this this some more. My motherboard is an ASUS P4T-E. Vista will boot from the harddrive with APIC enabled, but the DVD will not.

I use the setup tools to delete all of my Mandriva partitions to make way for Vista. Three partitions deleted, two created.

Both partitions reformated easily, and tell it which drive to load Vista on.

Copying of files proceeds to 29%, then errors out on a media read error. Quick search on google shows other people having problems with bad DVD burns.

Tried to reboot into Windows 2000 but my boot partition is gone. After some looking around I find this tool on the Vista DVD, bootsect.exe.

So I tell load back into the Vista DVD and select the recovery options. Using the recovery options I open a command prompt. The recovery options on the DVD are very nice. It can load a command prompt that has full access to all drives. NTFS, FAT32, or you can even load drivers for USB/firewire storage devices.

At the command prompt I issue the command bootsect

"bootsect /nt52 C:"

bootsect runs and fixes the MBR and sets up my Win2k OS drive as the boot drive.

Reboot server, system loads into Win2k, but hangs. Change APIC setting to enabled, system boots fine.


Reburn DVD at 2.4x, start install over again.

System loaded without any issues. Took approximately 1 hour.

The display appears to be very crisp. The UI looks much better than XP or Win2k. Installed mozilla without any issues. Installed Java without any issues.




Problems- Could not get shockwave to install on IE7.0. This is to be expected as nobody is coding apps specifically for 7.0 yet.

Shockwave would not autoinstall on Mozilla. Had to use the manual install procedure.

So for the folks that don't have access to run this, let me know if you want anything specifically tested, or what you would like to know more about, and I'll play around and let you know what I find. So far I really like it.

[mohaughn]

OK.. I have my first issue.. If I sleep the machine, or reboot it, when it comes back up it creates a new network connection for my home network.

So right now if I go into the network center and look at the network list I see:

Home Network (I renamed it this)
Network
Network 2
Network 3
Network 4


My thought is that this is trying to emulate software that I have on my laptop that identifies which network I connect to. If I'm at work I get certain settings, different settings at home on wired or wireless network as well. It does this via mac detection. However, all of these networks have the same MAC assigned to them. I'm going to try and figure out if this is a misconfiguration on my part, or a problem.

[phishphreek]

I had zero problems with the install. I decided to install in a vmware session.

I also don't have the network problem that you have.

I will agree with you about the interface. The interface is pretty nice.

I dont' like how they changed the "documents and settings" part too. Now everything is under "users".

Not to mention... In windows explorer, you don't have your classic menubar. No file, edit, view, etc. They moved everything around again... I HATE THAT! You can get it back though... organize, layouts, classic.

It'll take some getting used to and exploring. I haven't tried to install many programs yet. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow... but for now... time to party.

For some reason... the internet is VERY slow in this VM session... I'll have to mess around with that a bit. I'm running XP Media Center 2005 with 3 Virtual OS's all off the same bridged network card... maybe thats why... The other sessions don 't seem to have that problem.

Then again... it just started when I tried to download firefox and sun java... get your tin foil hats out. :-o lol

[bagggi]

could someone post screen shots?

had some real bad experience with the last version, and have run out of computers to install the new beta.

appreciate it.

[phishphreek]

What would you like screen shots of?
I'd be more than happy to post them... just let me know what you want.

[Striek]

For the people who have downloaded and installed a working copy, could someone please post the MD5 / SHA1 checksums of it?

<begin rant>
Stupid MS doesn't put any checksums on the download page
</end rant>

I got some checksums from torrent sites, but they may not be reliable, or may be from a different ISO.

Unless of course they provide a checksum, in which case, I still haven't found it.

Phish> I'd love to see some screenshots of a standard out-of-the box install, no windows open. If you could get some with a few windows open, maybe Windows Explorer and the control panel (or thier vista equivalent), that would be great.

[phishphreek]

Here are a couple I took last night.

I'll take some more soon.

[The Duck]

Phish, you think you could post your vista beta 2 checksums? I would be very grateful .

[phishphreek]

md5

0E733AB1A8E8FF9A8684FD3639332773 vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_x86fre_client-LB2CFRE_EN_DVD.iso

sha1

2404153a60d81103861b876878893222a5529d3a vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_x86fre_client-LB2CFRE_EN_DVD.iso

The link I used to download was
http://download.windowsvista.com/dl/...FRE_EN_DVD.iso

I used my own DL manager.

[Cemetric]

What about this one ??

0e733ab1a8e8ff9a8684fd3639332773

I'm still figuring the checksum tool out (it's on a linux box as my windows is installing )

Let me know if it's ok ... Otherwise I'll need to practice some more

.C.