So I downloaded a copy of Windows Vista RC1 last night – no it’s not pirated, there’s a link somewhere on microsoft.com. The download was pretty smooth. If you do it, choose the Akamai download manager method. I got the whole 2.52 gigs in just about an hour.
I dug up an old copy of Partition Magic and created a 20 gig partition. That went fairly smoothly, after a run of chkdsk to fix something PM didn’t like. Installed Vista into that partition. That went very smoothly. Just sat back and watched it do it’s thing and in the end it was done.
When I was first checking the disk out, I saw an option to choose which version to install: Home Basic, Business, Home Premium or Ultra. When I actually installed, I must have skipped over this step and I wound up with Ultra. I was surprised, because I didn’t think my laptop was up to the hardware specs for Ultra, but it installed and ran just fine.
The one thing it failed to find was a driver for my sound card. But I just asked it to update the driver and pointed it at C:\Windows (my XP install) and let it search. It found the driver, installed it, and I had sound.
Overall impressions. It’s nice. Look and feel is really slick. As far as common tasks and dialogs, everything was pretty familiar. Maybe too familiar. Most dialogs seem to have the same text, same layout. It largely feels like XP reskinned. There are some nice enhancements here and there, with the way explorer works, the start menu, etc. But again, it mostly feels like cosmetic changes. I didn’t really see anything that is going to revolutionize my life, much less my day to day computing experience. Then again, I only used it for a couple of hours and only with the default installed apps. (Freecell looks really nice!)
Maybe this weekend I’ll install Flash and FlashDevelop and do a little real work on it for a while.
One thing I noticed that had me a little concerned was that just sitting there doing nothing, with no apps open, the cpu was running 10-20%, sometimes higher. I don’t know what the hell it was using all those cpu cycles for. Maybe something to do with my inadvertent Ultra install. I didn’t dig in to see what process was so busy. Just noticed it and thought of it later.
One thing maybe someone can help me with. When I boot now, I get an OS chooser, for Vista or the “earlier” version of Windows. Vista is the default and will auto select after a few seconds. I’d much rather have XP as the default so I don’t have to sit poised like a praying mantis over the keyboard when I’m booting. How do I change that?