David Adamson's Blog

Vista Beta 1 first look

Having seen some of the cool Avalon Windows Presentation Foundation stuff demoed in the keynote at Tech.Ed, I can't wait to see the next Beta. However, onto Beta 1.

Startup time: It seems that for about 10 minutes after booting the Virtual PC, the CPU sits at 100%, rendering it all but useless. Things get a lot better after this though.

My Computer: The "My" has been dropped from My Computer

Local Drives: The C: drive we all know and love seems to have become E: drive. Interesting.

Search: Desktop search is now firmly integrated into the operating system. Available from the Start Menu.

Add/Remove Windows Components: I went looking for this to install IIS, in preparation for Visual Studio .Net 2005. I still can't find it.

Web Application Server: IIS Web site as well as ftp site is installed by default. The Services are disabled.

Firewall: The Windows firewall is not enabled by default.

Network Presentation: A new folder on the "All Programs" part of the Start Menu. I'll have to check this one out a bit more.

Vista Beta 1 Install Experience

Some notes on installing Windows Vista Beta 1.....

Machine: Dell Inspiron 6000, 2.0 Ghz, 1 GB RAM, 7200rpm Hard Disk, Windows XP Pro
Install Environment: Virtual PC SP1, 256MB RAM dedicated to VPC

All in all a very smooth, straight forward install experience. Very lengthy however. Understandably the Vista team have a lot higher priorites than optimising the installation routine at the moment, especially as it's only Beta 1.

Install time took just over 3hrs with the above configuration, including 2 reboots. A few images captured with Cropper (a cool screen capture utility written in c# by Brian Scott) are shown below:

The "Supplemental Driver Pack Installation Wizard", shown below, started up after the install had completed and had good intentions, but wasn't able to help out in the VPC environment

The Virtual Machine Additions installed successfully, but took over 10 mins. It seems that when Vista boots, it maxes the CPU out at 100% for around the same amount of time.