Vista Beta 2 Thoughts…
By jeffreycentex on May 26, 2006 in General Networking
Post Tags: General Networking
I have spent the past two days running Vista Beta 2 through its paces at the office - to see how “production-ready” it is. It’s getting there, but I still have a few unresolved problems:
1. Although my machine is capable of running Glass, there is no way I can tell it to enable transparency (I select the option and then close the dialog box, and then go back and it is unselected again. The same thing happens for color tinting).
2. I cannot add my sound card. There is no amount of coaxing I can do here. Better yet, I don’t have any missing devices (save my MS Fingerprint Reader) to try to force a driver install. I am assuming that Windows thinks it has found a driver for the hardware by enabling “High Definition Audio”. I’m still going to play with this one and try to properly diagnose and bug it this weekend.
3. Vista doesn’t like Equitrac Office, at least version 3.5.
However, on the good side, I am able to run all of the other applications that I normally use (i.e., AutoCAD, hydraulics/hydrology software, Office, etc.), albeit some of them operate slow (like moving a toolbar in AutoCAD which crawls in performance).
One thing that bugs me - and it is only cosmetic - how can 1.75 GB of RAM only merit a “2″ on the System Performance? What constitutes a 3 or a 4?
On the network front, everything works fine with WinXP/Windows 2003 Server interoperability. I haven’t had a chance to play with some of the fancier features, though.
This weekend, I will install Longhorn Server on my testbed network at home. Time to figure out NAP (Network Access Protection) and all of the cool security technologies.
But, to answer an earlier question - for now, I can feasibly run Vista Beta 2 in a quasi production environment. But I am keeping my True Image “image” close at hand if it bonks.
