Preview: Microsoft Vista RC 2

Any feedback on memory issues? Can it be made to look and run like XP classical, without side bars and tons of icons? I am debating upgrade to Vista or XP Pro (from Home) to allow program access to the full 3 GB ram in my machine and don't like the sound of many comments on Vista: sounds like too much eye candy and too many unneeded changes just for the sake of change. Maybe I should just upgrade to XP Pro - but then how long before programs start appearing that are not XP compatible?

When I first got the Beta before RC! I was very impressed with Vista. With RC ! I was less impressed with it except for the new email client. I have yet to try RC2.

DRAM in the 32 bit version is odd. We have 4GB on the Tyan System (dual Xeon) board. Tyan reports the 4GB and under beta 2, so did Vista. However under both RC1 and RC2 Vista reports only about 3GB. I thought Vista was supposed to fix that!

We also have it installed in a Dell Inspiron XPS with a 3.4GHz P4 and 2GB DRAM. The results are as good there and since it can only handle 2GB of RAM, the memory issue is moot on that box.

Speed is OK on both, and on the workstation video on our ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (dual display) is great. ATI has done a nice job on the drivers.

We are running the JAVA beta 1.6.0 beta 2 and our JAVA apps are happy.

We are running the Trend Micro PC-Cillin beta on both platforms and it is just fine.

We have a number of peripherals that are still not supported and I guess we will have to wait for the formal release to get that resolved, (including our Verizon broadband PCMCIA card).

We have a CTI app which is not compatible with Vista. We have a Share Point Server (2003) which doesn't seem to like something about either IE7 or Vista. I don't know which, but it continues to work well with our XP workstations so we make be looking at an upgrade to SPS 2007 soon!

There's an odd bug/feature when opening up a remote desktop on RC2. Under Aero, in RC2 the task bar is sort of translucent. Once you open up a remote desktop, you're still working with Aero, but the taskbar in solid black (as it always was in RC1).

There are a number of things that are harder to do in Vista than they were in XP. Some things are just different and I hate change when there is no apparent reason for the change. It just makes support of all those techo-hostile folks out there so much more fun!

Overall, RC2 is faster to load and more stable than RC1.

I have been using RC1 for a while(about a month) and so far I have experienced some hang up's and degredation of system performance at times. I'm running Vista on an HP Pavilion ze4930us laptop that does meet minimal requirements yet I feel a little left out because I cannot take full advantage of the graphics enhancements. Yet I've still noticed an notable improvement. I also am beta testing Office 2007 Tecnical Refresh and it runs a whole lot smoother on vista than it used to on Windows XP Professional SP2. I encourage everyone to try Office 2007, the user interfance enhancements are wonderful. As a person who learns and then teaches software to others the new changes are great. It will be a lot easier and efficient in teaching others this version.

I would never do an upgrade from XP to Vista. Vista needs a clean install.
No one knows what applications will run on Vista at this time.
Why upgrade?

I have been running RC2 for two days and here are my thoughts so far, after having to download it twice because the first failed to install: 1) clean install was much faster and some new drivers left me with only three to find drivers for on a Dell E1405 laptop; 2) The OS seems snappier, as in fewer awkward hangs at times in RC1; 3) recovery from sleep is improved -- it was causing me to do hard shutdowns in RC1.

Otherwise, it is the same Vista I have come to enjoy, so that is a good sign that it will reach solidity soon. That is quite a blow to MS to have Live services fail while Firefox works as Oliver notes here, but seems like it will be fixed quickly (I sent the PR guy for Vista the above preview and Roger Grimes' concerns about IE7, so I imagine the issues will get fast attention.)

My issue with IE7 and some of the other app navs, also for Media Player, is the lack of controls and awkwardness of trying to find them. They are too minimalist and the layout is odd. I am used to Firefox, which with the lo-fi theme looks killer in Vista, so, sorry MS. The US-CERT made me switch when it recommended swithing away from IE for security reasons a couple of years ago and I now can't go back for everyday browsing.

I like Vista and it will fend of some of the shift to Mac (which I hear consistently from family and colleagues these days, especially with dual boot and Parallels for virtual dual OS) but it does seem like a little too little on new with so much time between revs. Still, nice going Microsoft, for actually listening to users and responding with a new, yet familiar interface for everyday computing.

And I am pleased that fears the only high end machines will get Aero features (mainly the 3D app window flip-through in the pic in this post, and the see-through windows) is proved wrong. My $699 Dell laptop is chugging Aero pretty well, only dropping down when rich media Web pages drag too much memory away from the shared RAM, I assume. But it switches back automatically, so nice job again.

I am going to write up my own thoughts after more time with it, and some tests of DRM installs, namely Helix with RealPlayer and Napster.

By the way, I just now read your question about my experiences with RC2...and coming from an avid XP SP2 User, I would say it is horrible.

For starters my microsoft mouse and keyboard kit do not have drivers (they are the latest kit available from microsoft, wireless laser 6000). So i cannont use the extra buttons that came with my keyboard and for my mouse, it is terribly annoying to use since the real drivers for it include better acceleration varaibles...now i feel like I have no control over the mouse movement unless i set it to move really slow.

Next, and MOST IMPORTANTLY, I work with dual lcds. In XP, this worked out great for me, I never had a problem. In vista it is HORRIFIC.

I advise anyone using dual monitors NOT TO UPGRADE TO VISTA if it is anything like RC2.

My video card is new, and fully supported by vista drivers, so this isn't the problem, (7600 GT by the way).

When working with dual monitors, with and without aero being enabled, I constantly have one of the screens become "ruined" by some sort of text overlay with the character [ all over the screen. And i mean ALL OVER. If i open media center and close it, this will happen for sure everytime.

I can't choose what monitor i want media center to open on. If media center is open on one monitor I can't work on anything else in the other monitor.

VERY ANNOYING.

I hate vista right now, and I am normally the first person to upgrade to new things.