E1705 and Vista Beta 2

Well I took the plunge and installed Vista Beta 2 on the E1705 here are my specs of the laptop:
1.83 ghz core duo
1 gig ram
80 gig HD
256mb X1400
Bluetooth
Intel 3945 Wireless Lan

The install went fine, no problems. So far all of my devices are working on it which include:
HP Laserjet 1012 printer
WesternDigital Mybook premium 320gig HD on Firewire
Ipod 60gig video
All of the internal devices on the laptop i.e. bluetooth, intel wireless lan, sound, modem, etc...

Some issues with the above were:
the printer drivers from win xp worked, but it was kind of confusing on what port the printer was on since it did not auto locate it for you so it took me about 4 tries to figure it out.
The external HD worked fine with the USB then when I tried to switch to firewire it would not work, but after a restart with it hooked up via firewire all was well, it asked for the driver and couldnt find out, but it is still working.
IPOD, This interfaces with the new media player, but I have not messed with it yet. This will eliminate I-Tunes and other programs such as Anapod explorer.
All other devices either worked with the original vista drivers or windows update had new ones for the memory card reader and the modem so all is good there. The front buttons work, the media direct button, which opened media center in xp does not do anything.

The negatives so far:
I tried to install the ATI Vista beta drivers and they installed just fine, but afterwords I only had a black desktop. I tried to do the uninstall of the drivers, but it just sat at the "gathering information" stage so I cancelled and did a system restore. I may try again to get it working again, but the windows drivers work pretty well. I dont do hardly any 3d gaming so im not worried about it.
The touchpad scroll things dont work as there is no driver and I dont have a mouse so it is not so good even though the scroll portion sucks anyway.
I cant get file and printer sharing to work with my windows XP machines, but I havent really played with them to much to see if there is a workaround.
I have not installed any software yet, just drivers.

Things I like:
If you pause on a taskbar item such as a website or dialoge box it brings up a small image of what it is. I found this helpful when downloading things so you can just see a quick image of how much has downloaded.
The new media player is pretty nice as well, havent played with it to much, I would like it to have a fade between song function, but I cant find it.
I dont know if I like the new IE7 yet, it does have the tabs like Firefox, but again I havent played with it yet.

This seems pretty stable, but time will tell. The interface for everything is different than xp, not to the point where you cant find your way around, but ive found myself clicking the wrong thing or looking for something that wasnt so obvious. I like it so far and will continue to experiment with software such as Firefox and Office.

Well those are my comments so far with Vista Beta 2. Time will tell and I will post things as I try them.

 

Well Firefox works. I will still use firefox while I get used to IE7

 

I'm testing Vista Beta 2 on my E1505.

It's neat to try out the new features, but overall, it just doesn't perform anywhere near as well as XP. This is understandable as it is still in beta.

I've had a few lockups as well, certain software won't install (also understandable), and going into sleep/hibernation is much slower than in XP.

For now, I'm gonna switch back to XP ... but after getting a taste for Vista, I'll be looking forward to the release candidates / final version to see how things have improved!

-DJS

 

im gonna run it for a few weeks. I dont think it performs as well as XP because it is designed to use alot more system resources. How much ram are you running. I have noticed a few, I guess ill call them twitches. Sometimes when you double click something it doesnt open. It takes a few tries to open some things.

 

Is it even worth it to try and install vista on my e1405 with 512mb ram? l'll be getting another 512 dimm but not for a little while...

 

I wouldnt, the upgrade advisor thing says it will work with 512, but even with 1 gig my laptop runs a bit slow and I have no software running yet, just basic functionality.

 

I just loaded the Beta today and WOW it's sweet! Nearly all the devices work "out of the box". I loaded the nVidia Vista driver and it worked very well. It was really choppy and sluggish until I loaded the nVidia driver, then it got nice and smooth. IE7 is sweet, the menus are sweet... I haven't found anything I don't like yet, just doing a lot of tweaking and experimenting. WMP11 is also flipping awesome. IMO, if you take XP, make it easier to use and give it a better interface, you get Vista. I think Microsoft NAILED this OS... Apple should be very afraid.

 

You guys doing dual installs/separate partitions?

Good for you for taking the plunge. At least there is someone out there we can trust to debug Microsoft's new products.

 

Too much sweetness... *reaches for insulin shot.

 

One thing I am noticing running on battery power, even in sleep mode the battery goes down extremely rapidly. I powered it up around noon, used it for 15 mins, put it to sleep for a few hours and it was down to like 65 percent. I then used it for about 15 mins and put it to sleep again for 2 hours and it is down to 50 percent. I know this is on a 1705, but with xp and notebook control center(or what ever its called) I was getting around 4.5 hours of battery life on the 9 cell. I dont think sleep works the same way as it does in XP.

 

This issue has been reported widely in the last few days. Vista kills battery power pretty quickly, and it seems to be a bug rather than the OS just being power hungry.

 

Where did you get the nVidia Vista driver? On nVidia's website, I cannot find any Vista drivers for the "Go" mobile video adapters.

Right now, I am using Microsoft's Vista driver for the 7900GS (came with Vista), even though I have a 7900GTX, and it is working, but I don't have any control panel stuff...

 

I am at a hotel now that has high speed over ethernet and not wireless. Vista recognized it and connected. There is no more having to enable your wired ethernet port to use it and then having the little icon for the wireless x'd out in the task tray and when not using the wired having to do anything about it. Its pretty slick that it auto enables/disables the network adapters. I guess it doesnt turn off the wireless radio if its not in use, but that would be a pretty slick feature to turn off the radio if you are hardwired to a network. If anybody is using the ATI drivers and gotten them to not show a black screen I would like to know.

 

I have been trying to pay some bills today and VISTA seems to have a bug where I cant access some secure websites. It is extremely slow to load in both firefox and IE7. I went to a computer with xp and went to the same sites and they pop up instantly. There must be a bug in the encryption aspect of VISTA. Also do not try to use any software to change or tweak the registry settings. I used a networking tweak program and when I rebooted to apply the changes, vista wouldnt boot because it said the registry was corrupt. I guess it doesnt like changes to the registry unless it does it.

 

I downloaded the LaptopVideotogo.com 88.16 (88.61?) driver along with the modified INF file.

With the regular Aero Glass install, the OS was eating roughly 650MB of RAM. Considering I only had 512MB, I was shocked how smoothly it was running. I went through the services and disabled enough of them to get memory usage down to roughly 360MB - with all the Aero Glass features intact.

I'm still really enjoying my Vista experience, except Halo PC - a Microsoft game - is not playable yet... Oh well, I just have to reboot and select XP if I want to play.