Ok, first few observations.
I intalled Vista on my Dell Latitude D600, a device that Dell is still very commited to supporting, unfortunatly it has a Mobility 9000 Radeon in it which ATI are shunning with their Vista drivers, which according to posts I found with Google on Driverheaven.net the only solution would be to upgrade my graphics card (hello? Mobility was a clue as to why I can't do that?). Well Google, this one is for you.
If you want the ATI Radeon Mobility 9000 to work in Vista you need to manually increase your resolution to at least 800x600 (so you can see what you are doing) and then manually change the driver to 9000 Series and reboot. It shouldn't work and I almost felt it wouldn't - ignore all warnings - it works. the only issue occurs when you first get in and it doesn't seem like anything is happening. But then you realise its just a resolution issue. Change to 800x600 and then back up again (or mess around until it resolves). You won't get the aero effect going on rather the metal effect.
Nice to see Media Center in there, although to be honest I rarely use it, I tried to connect it to my Xbox 360 and for a few moments it looked like it was going to work. Alas no. Perhaps in the Consumer CTP (the same one that marks the end of the beta 2 process, while not actually being beta2 - confused?)
Media Player is looking alot nicer and for the first time I was able to experience sound on my home Vista machine, choosing to check out royksopp - The Understanding. Library was nice and fast, but then I had one album in it.
Speed is quite sluggish on my laptop, but I had never tried it before, so it is hard to tell if there has been an improvement, although I know that there will be improvements in speed now the product is feature complete. I have still lots of testing to do and still actually ahve to install it on my main rig.
Why have'nt I done it yet? Lazy and my main rig is another room. Plus I wanted to talk about the install process as it was happening. Also the NVIDIA drivers have been pretty dismal so far - you get the Aero effect but the windows have been very sluggish. I talked to NVIDIA a while ago and they stated that their wouldn't be another release of drivers (they did release drivers just after the first CTP arrived) until beta 2... well thankfully due to all the confusion and the fact that we are in the beta 2 phase (aren't we?) it looks like NVIDIA will be releasing new drivers today.
They have not been released yet, to me or the public, but I can tell you that they will be at least version 87.15 ad should be much improved. (also a hell of alot newer than the current WindowsXP versions)
More later ;D
