Vista Beta 2

[SugarCoat]

With Vista? Because you definitely do need them for XP.

no you dont, not on newer revision motherboards. I've been using SATA drives for the last two years and i have never once supplied a floppy disc with a driver to get it to install. Older versions it was true. I had some peice of junk 478pin board that did, then when i switched to 925X (Abit AA8) i had no issues, same with the last 2 Nforce boards i have, one being an early revision Asus A8N and the next being a cheap DFI Infinity SLI. The Infinity is a chopped down version of the Nforce 4 Lanparty SLI. I've also setup a few computers including one using an Abit Nforce 4 AN8 (939 again) and Abit LG-80 (945G). None of them have ever needed SATA drivers.

Believe me, I don't go out of my way to provide it with drivers.

In my BIOS settings, the drive is showing up under SATA1. Would you like a picture proving that fact?
I pop in the Vista DVD that I burned, it boots up, asks for an installation key, and then STOPS at the part where I am to select the partition to install. I select the drive which has no partitions, hit "New", format that newly created partition, and then attempt to hit "Next."
And apologies if it was implicated that I didn't need drivers for my XP install, because I most certainly did.

Now see thats strange. It shouldnt see the drive at all if it needs drivers, that was the entire problem was that it couldnt find SATA drives. Its possible, though unlikely, its the brand of HDD. I've been using nothing but maxtor and seagate. Is the jumper block set to master?

 

[zsouthboy]

no you dont, not on newer revision motherboards. I've been using SATA drives for the last two years and i have never once supplied a floppy disc with a driver to get it to install. Older versions it was true. I had some peice of junk 478pin board that did, then when i switched to 925X (Abit AA8) i had no issues, same with the last 2 Nforce boards i have, one being an early revision Asus A8N and the next being a cheap DFI Infinity SLI. The Infinity is a chopped down version of the Nforce 4 Lanparty SLI. I've also setup a few computers including one using an Abit Nforce 4 AN8 (939 again) and Abit LG-80 (945G). None of them have ever needed SATA drivers.



Now see thats strange. It shouldnt see the drive at all if it needs drivers, that was the entire problem was that it couldnt find SATA drives. Its possible, though unlikely, its the brand of HDD. I've been using nothing but maxtor and seagate. Is the jumper block set to master?

Ah, I think I know what you're doing. You've been installing windows onto a PATA drive. (Which is no sweat, and doesn't require drivers)

It's a SATA drive, there's not master/slave setting.

Drive is a Maxtor 300GB Maxline III - the one with the huge MTBF compared to most consumer drives. Yeah, that one.

 

[SugarCoat]

my mistake not thinking. they are sata drives, not pata. 6 barracudas and 3 raptors. No jumpers. Just baffled at what would be causing it to not work for you so started to name some other things, wasnt thinking.

Just did a quick google search and you certainly arent alone. I still dont really understand why it wouldnt work.


My drive setup for my vista PC is:

IDE Channel 0 Slave : DVD Rom
IDE Channel 4 Master : WD Raptor
IDE Channel 5 Master : Barracuda

Only other thing i could think to suggest is making sure your BIOS are defaulted and switching the channel of the physical HDD. I assure you that quite a few of us can infact install XP (both 32 and 64 bit) and the current Vista beta on lone SATA drives without drivers or bypasses. I see no reason it shouldnt be possible on your setup.

 

[PeterAce]

My Epox 8KRA2+ and my new A8N-32 SLI Deluxe (Nforce 4) requires SATA drivers. My AsRock 939-Dual didn't require drivers for SATA (but it does for SATAII).

I've just finnished a job at a local computer shop we have had to install an uncountable large number of motherboards when building/upgrading PCs.

Some motherboards don't require SATA drivers (mass storage driver installed before the OS) but lots and lots still do.

 

[Tahir2]

It all depends on the age of the motherboard and the controller. A Sil controller (popular on the higher end boards) requires the drivers whilst the newer VIA/NVIDIA/ATI controllers that are built into the main BIOS do not require drivers on Windows XP.

YMMV...

 

[zsouthboy]

Here's the problem - I _kinda_ want to play with Vista!

Yeah, it runs in a VM just fine, but I want to experience the pretty . (and pass judgement on it )

 

[RobertR1]

Got the 64-bit version on that second drive today (managing "dual boot" by boot drive order in the bios --thanks for the suggestion, Ingenu).

Took 11.3GB for the new Windows directory (there wasn't one before).

MS/ATI/Creative get the LLPOF Award (Liar Liar Pants on Fire) for both Cats and X-Fi drivers requiring reboots. How the award should be shared amongst the three I leave to them to determine.

Can't get to the internet for some reason. Have an nforce A8N-SLI Premium. The device is there and looks okay, but I'm getting just "Local" or "Limited" connectivity, can't see the rest of the network, nor the internet beyond. Ethernet is jacked into a router that has a cable modem also attached. The IP address it gets doesn't look right (a 169.).

Another goofy little thing. Running dual monitors the mouse will only cross over from one monitor to the other in one direction. Since it detected my monitors in reverse of what they physically are located on my desk as, this is a bit of a pain. I have to move the mouse off the left hand monitor to the left for it to show up on the far right of the right hand monitor. There is a "wall" that won't let the mouse move from the right edge of the left hand monitor onto the left edge of the right hand monitor. Tho probably I can fix this by flip-flopping the monitor cables. Doesn't happen that way in XP, even tho XP thinks they ought to be flipped too. (Edit: Hmm, I didn't try drag and drop tho in the display properties, maybe that would have fixed it.)

It's purty, I'll give it that. There's certainly going to be a degree of "okay, where the f*ck did they hide that this time?". And without internet/network working yet I'm not going to be spending much time there!

Turn off "UAS" in the Accounts/Security and then plug your network cable into another slot. I wasted about 30mins and this seemed to work.

 

[Geo]

You mean "UAC"? That didn't help.

I'm on Vista x64 right this moment. I didn't really fix the internet problem, so much as I sidestepped it. We have two broadband accounts here, and I plugged directly in to the second one, without going thru the router. So it's something about the router that Vista isn't liking.

My multi-mon mouse issue was fixed by drag 'n drop flipping of the monitor positions in Display Properties.

Trillian is working, once it was installed as "Run as Administrator", which is a right-click option [Thanks to Rys for the tip!].

Creative does not have x64 drivers apparently, or at least they don't work for x64 on Vista Beta 2. They appear to have been released in November, so they are quite old. Net searching suggests practically no one has gotten them to work. A couple reports of some extreme hacking producing basic sound out of X-FI, but I really don't care to perform major driver surgery to make it work. [Insert standard %$^& Creative drivers! rant here]

Edit: Whoa. Despite assurances around the 'net that it won't work, I seem to have achieved basic sound with X-Fi on x64. You have to turn off mandatory driving signing (which is on by default in x64) and then Run as Administrator. I've got basic Windows sounds and listened to a webcast. Kewl.

 

[RobertR1]

When I turn on my 360, Vista picked it right up and wanted me to go into Media center and assign some 8digit number off my TV??? I couldn't be bothered but it seemed interesting nevertheless. Anyone play around with this?


Tip:
If you can't boot into XP after a vista install on a partition of the same drive, check the boot.ini of the XP partition to make sure that the Vista install didn't modify it. Mine was modified to "D:\windows" instead of "C:\windows" since Vista saw my XP partition as it's D: drive. Despite the warning that Vista places in the boot.ini, the bootmanager ONLY controls Vista install as the OS selection screen. Once you choose "Older Windows System" everything is once again referenced off the boot.ini

 

[Lezmaka]

The new GUI sucks, the new Theme is fine however.
(new GUI = no more "File, Edit..." bar)

It installs just fine on my SATA drive contrarily to both Win2k SP4 & WinXP SP2...

Managed to crash it in 70minutes.
It's rather fast for a beta.

Device Manager drivers update through web seems broken, even though you can get the drivers by going through Windows Update.

Default account is Admin, that sucks.
Kernel takes 64MB. (RAM)
"Rise privilege" or whatever it's called poping windows to ask you whether you want to do something with an ADMIN account is SILLY, however windows popping for you to log as Admin from a User session is rather useful IMO.
You can get default Theme back, but new Explorer and IE interfaces are really crap (yeah I know I said that right at the beginning ^^)
New nVidia Control Panel I don't like, seems "Control Panel for Dummies".

Installer takes forever (one hour, XP SP2 installs in 15 minutes).
I really wish they add a question to ask you if you want standard windows GUI or new Vista experience, for I really don't like the new Vista GUI. (yes 3rd time)

That's about it for now.

You can get to the File...Edit... bar by pressing the Alt button. You can also set it to always show the menu bar by clicking Organize -> Layout -> Classic Menus or Organize -> Folder Options -> View tab -> Always show Classic Menus. Pressing the Alt button gives you the menu bar in IE as well, and you can right-click on the toolbar and choose Classic Menu to always have it.

 

[Lezmaka]

Here's some info I found useful regarding the install.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/50539/50539.html

Here's my best Vista tip: If you do decide to dual boot, you can trigger the install in two ways: from within XP, or by rebooting the computer and booting from the DVD. If you use the former method, XP will be on the C drive and Vista will be on the D drive on both installs by default. However, if you install by booting from the DVD, XP will be on the C drive while you're in XP, and Vista will be on the C drive while you're in Vista. The latter is preferable, I've found.

 

[Lezmaka]

I'm finding things just by stumbling around, and I have to say that the Performance Diagnostic Console (in Administrative Tools) is pretty darn cool. It's separated into 4 sections, CPU, Disk, Network, and Memory.

CPU gives you the process, # of threads, current cput usage and average usage.
Disk gives you file the process is accessing, read/write in bytes/min
Network gives you the IP address the process is accessing and send/receive bytes/min
Memory gives you Hard Faults/min (whatever that is), working set, shearable, and private.

Here's a couple screenshots showing the screen.
Screenshot 1
Screenshot 2

Most of this information is probably available in XP, but I haven't seen where all this information is available in one screen. Who knows how useful it all would end up being, but it's just cool.

 

[fallguy]

I like it pretty well so far. Except Flip3D isnt working for me, yet Aero Glass is. Little confused by that.

I hope ATi gets some more drivers out soon, that enable Overdrive, and Crossfire. And Logitech gets some out for their gamers mice and keyboards. My X-Fi install went fine. However, I do not have 5.1 as an option for the speakers, just stero or mono.

Overall pretty pleased. Its just a beta, but appears to be faily stable. All except for the sleep mode, which Ive disabled now, since it never worked for me. I think because my mouse+kb are on a USB hub, from my LCD. When more drivers come out, it will get even better. Im on it now, dual booting with x64 XP.

 

[howdy b]

vista

I had problems downloading 64 bit version ,got same 14 meg file other guy mentioned,finally was able to download with Kanotix linux....32 bit version downloaded fine with XP.
Installed 32 bit ver.
Took 1 hr to installl,detected all devices fine.
First glitch ,it wouldn't read a floppy with bookmarks created on XP.Had to burn to cd.
Installed 3d mark 01, got half the score I get with win2k on same machine.
Installed UT2003 demo ,to run benchmark ,got half the score as win2k.
Had a hard time editing UT2003 user ini file ,wouldn't let me change it.Finally I copied file ,edited the copy ,and replaced it.
Installed Netscape with full download version ,Worked once, then wouldn't load,
uninstalled, installed with web installer , worked fine.
IE sucks, as always, only worse now.
Networked fine ,even with Linux machines.
By the way does anybody if you can install earlier version of Nvidia video drivers? Am running 5600ultra card ,and newer drivers suck with it.
Overall impression is that it isn't much ,if any improvement over XP.
Much talked about desktop ain't much to talk about.
Unless future updates improve gaming prerformance , I probably won't buy it.
I use Windows mostly for gaming ,Linux for most other things,especially internet related stuff ,Way more secure , much less hassle.Much cheaper.

 

[Rys]

b5456 came out today/yesterday. Running the x64 version on an E6700, but not sure what (if anything) is new or improved versus b5384.4.

I really like it personally, and I've been (mostly) using it as my full time OS for the last wee while. Only software dev has seen me back in XP x64, and that's only because my system's 2GiB tends to be chewed up quicker with Vista right now when all my tools are loaded.

 

[howdy b]

Posted couple days ago ,with some problems. Since have given up on that machine (2200 tbred b ,512 ram, 5600 ultra 128 meg video) Not enough machine...
Installed on 2500 barton ,1 gig ram , Ati 9700 pro video , Much better.Still is ram hog,but runs much smoother.Figured out how to shut off Admin. rights pop up. Makes things much better.
UT2003 benchie about 20% lower than in XP .3d Mark 01 , about 30% lower than XP.
Can't turn much off in services ,Turn off the Firewall , get no networking.Turned off superfetch , as it eats up hd space over time .
Most programs I loaded worked fine.Hates old dos stuff.
Quake 3 won't run . Suspect video driver problem.Open gl related error.
I Refuse to use Internet Explorer, Portable Firefox is the best browser I've found ,and it works great with Vista.Very fast.
Overall I am beginning to like Vista, Hopefully gaming preformance will improve in future releases.