Two+ Weeks after Beta 2

First off, I need to apologize for not having any new content up here in a while, but with the release of Beta 2, we've been swamped here internally. All things aside, someone on the team should have found the time to post before now, but that said, I'm posting now.

It's been two weeks now that I've had the experience of playing around with Vista Beta 2. My team and I recently held a Vista Beta 2 Install-a-Thon here in the DC Office where employees could bring in their laptops and have Vista and Office 2007 installed on them. While the event came off as a success (more than 20% of the Federal Sales Team now runs Vista), we definitely learned a lot along the way about Vista, Driver Issues, BIOS Issues, well Issues in general.

To start with we didn't have the time before hand to setup WDS or even get an image based setup installed. We create a public share on a local server, dropped in all of our applications and dropped in all of the drivers. We burned off a ton of BIOS upgrade CD's for all of the Microsoft "standard" laptops, and we burned off a ton of Vista DVD's.

Internally we have the following common standard laptops: HP Compaq NC6000, HP Compaq NC8000, Toshiba M200, Toshiba M2, Toshiba M3, Toshiba M4, Toshiba M400, and the Toshiba M5. Additionally a couple of people also had the HP 6125 64-bit machine.

The older HP machines (NC6000/NC8000) run Vista fine, require no special hoops to jump through, and require no BIOS upgrades at all. The only catch is that if you don't want your neighbors on the airplane to hear your music, you'd better install the HP SoundMax driver and not use the in-box driver. The Toshiba's on the other hand were quite a lot of work.

The M200 requires a BIOS upgrade, followed by some super secret registry key to be set, otherwise UI performance is terrible. Specifically, go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4D36E968-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\0000 and add the following DWORD reg key: RMHotPlugSupportDisable      DWORD     0x30003

The M2 requires no BIOS upgrade, but you have two choices for drivers. You may select the in-box driver and receive no glass, or you may use the nVidia Go FX5200 driver (chosen by manually specifying it from the in-box drivers, and approving the warning message). The replaced nVidia driver lets you use glass, but you can not sleep (well you can but your machine will never wake up). The external monitor display works, but you need to disable glass before deciding to project, then you can re-enable glass.

The M3 and M4 units are virtually identical (except for tablet functionality) and both require BIOS upgrades. After which these units work well. The M400 requires a new BIOS (two new versions have been released since Beta 2). After which, the unit works well, but Glass can be a bit sluggish. The M5 requires a new BIOS, and then the machine just flys.

Now for the fine print. All of the BIOS upgrades are MS internal only right now as Toshiba is presently developing them and testing them for a future release. Thus the drivers that enable glass, and allow for many of the other features (biometric reader, HDD shock sensor, bluetooth, etc.) are also internal only now. Maybe in a future public release of Vista, we'll actually get this stuff out in front of the world to play with.

The HP 6125 runs well on 32-bit code (we didn't try on the 64-bit stuff due to the fact that we hadn't prepped for any of these laptops showing up), but once again not all of the drivers are available through Windows Update.

Enough about the machines, how is Vista? The truth is that it runs well. The biggest complaints center around all of the above quirkiness (this will be ironed out by RTM, but with a new driver model now it is presenting greater issues over past OS's, although some of this quirkiness always attaches itself to a major OS release). Additionally, there is a lot of feedback around UAP being overly zealous. Read on for more bits of goodness in this area. Network Center has also baffled and confounded many a user. Aside from that, most people are finding everything generally fast enough (although perf has continually improved since Beta 2) and the OS usable and stable. Caveat to all of this is that Vista gobbles up RAM. At least with Beta 2, 1Gig is usable, 2 Gigs is good. Anything else, and don't bother aside from testing purposes.

Well what's changing with UAP? I'm not in the product group, so I'm not privy to all of the direction setting, etc., but with newer builds (I'm now running 5452), some cool things have shown up. Specifically, the dialog box akin to "A program that you are currently not using is attempting to elevate, would you like to view the request". This has been triggered in two areas for me. Number 1, when Group Policy has pushed and executed something on my machine that I did not run. Read this as when a vulnerability (not that there are any now) is exploited and attempts to elevate, you get a sensible dialog. Number 2, when one program that I did execute, spawns off another separate program that attempts to elevate. Meaning I run a normal program (i.e. Word) and the program executes some harmful script and executes a separate program that attempts to elevate. I like these dialogs, as they mean a lot more to me than the generic UAP dialog. These are actually the times that I care about elevating applications, and not when I double click on an application. It will be interesting to see where this leads.

As for Network Center, I can't find it anymore! I don't know whether its gone completely, or I just can't find it. The bottom line is that it looks like some changes are coming in this area.

All in all, there are some hiccups in certain areas now, but I like where the road is heading. And whenever I go back to Windows XP, it just feels so clunky and dated.

-Z

Comments

• Anonymous
  July 31, 2006
  >>> The HP 6125 runs well on 32-bit code (we didn't try on the 64-bit stuff due to the fact that we hadn't prepped for any of these laptops showing up), but once again not all of the drivers are available through Windows Update.
  
  I did build 64bit Vista on the 6125 using some XP64 drivers.  It performed quite well on a March '06 build.