Beta 1

Windows Vista:

 

I think one of the coolest new things is the simple installation. I mean there is only two tings to configure, where to install, and what to call the computer, that’s it, nothing else. My initial install of Vista was onto a Virtual Machine, care of Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. Pretty nice, I want to see the 3D desktop so I need to find some IDE drives.

 

That leads me into one of my chief complaints, my Adaptec 2940UW SCSI card is no longer supported! That’s about all I use on my computers, so I will need to find something else that Vista detects. I’m hopeful that my nVideo GeForce IV card will work for 3D but I haven’t installed Vista on my desktop yet.

 

Longhorn Server Core:

 

This is the first version of Server I installed as it was very small, just under 400mb so it fit nicely onto a CD-ROM as opposed to the DVD required by both Longhorn Server and Windows Vista. The interface is drastically changed, you only get two console windows, no Explorer interface whatsoever. Once I figured out how to do things though it was very straightforward. Again the installation was onto a Virtual Machine and no problems, that install was by far the shortest, only 1hr and 20min!

 

Longhorn Server:

 

This install has so far taken the longest and I’m not entirely sure why. My only guess is the fact that there is a lot of extra logging and stuff enabled perhaps in the beta builds, therefore it takes significantly longer to get going. I started this install on a Virtual Machine last nite, and by morning it was still going, or at least it said it was going but no lights flashing so not sure what happend there.

 

The original intent was to setup a WDS, Windows Distibution Service server, so that I could push out Vista images to my laptops and desktop PC’s to see how that works as compared to how I currently do things with RIS. I had wanted to use Longhorn Core to do that, but it can’t work in that capacity so that’s why I started working with Longhorn Server.

 

I started the regular install onto a small IDE drive turns out that a 7GB drive is big enough to hold Longhorn, but there is no space for temp files, and it errors out with a TAPI32.dll error which is kind of weird. So I changed up to a 15GB drive and the install started with no problems. The biggest thing is just time, I started at about 1:30 or so and 2hrs later the install was still going. The lights were flashing so I figured things were going ok, but we’ll see when I get home.

 

If it is working then I will configure it as a DC in my Windows 2003 Domain, and configure WDS on it and provide the initial Vista image so that when I get home after work tonite I can image my laptop with a clean install of Windows Vista Beta 1, Build 5112.

 

Am I a geek or what?