After the generally uneventful Windows XP installation I proceeded with Windows Vista beta 2 installation. I expected from Vista to recognize already installed Windows XP and not to destroy its MBR, but to “envelope” it and offer me to boot from either. That worked just fine, except for the weird wording – in the boot menu, Vista is called “Microsoft Windows” and XP is called “Earlier version of Windows”. Generic and imprecise, but fine.

Once I booted into Vista, I was delighted to find that all hardware has been recognized and working properly (the driver for the modem was automatically installed through Windows Update), including Aero glass! I was surprised to find already about 6 important updates, but since Wi-Fi worked just fine, I immediately installed them.

Two things were not quite right, of which one is minor and another huge disappointment (that Microsoft for sure will have to fix by the time they ship). The minor thing is that everything but antivirus is built in, so you have to download the antivirus separately. Since Vista is still in beta, not many manufacturers advertise Vista compatibility. Fortunately, there is at least one that is freely downloadable – avast! (the exclamation mark is part of the name).

The major thing is that Vista does not dynamically lower the speed of the processor at all! Modern laptops are equipped with processors that don’t need to run at their full speed all the time. In fact, most of the time the processor would actually run at the lowest possible speed. You’d think this would not make much of a difference. Well, it does. The temperature rises all the time if the processor is running at the max speed and as a consequence the ventilator is on most of the time, which is really annoying.

What’s really strange is that advanced mobile features have been heavily touted by various Microsoft Vista evangelist and I expected this to be better supported than in XP. The new UI for battery/performance settings is generally speaking better in the sense that it allows greater degree of customization, but it’s worth nothing at the moment because some of this just plain does not work. You can see the new streamlined “all the ways to suspend/hibernate/shutdown” dialog on the screenshot to the right (click opens a full size image).

Fortunately, there is a utility out there that can help you taming your processor speeds called RMClock. Some level of proficiency with how processors generally operate is necessary though – if you don’t know what FSB speed, multiplier and processor voltage are, then you’re stuck because the utility is completely undocumented. But it’s not too complicated either – simplified, the technology works by lowering the voltage to the processor and decreasing the FSB multiplier. RMClock will detect properly the minimal and the maximal multiplier and is able to deduce correct voltage to go with it. Thus, it is enough to set things up as on the screenshot to the right – I added the min and the max value and then two more in between, the utility calculated the rest.

Besides from this, there were no serious problems with Vista. It does eat a lot more memory than XP and the GUI is quite demanding on your video card. Windows Explorer is quite different from what you might be used to (I use Total Commander so it’s not a big problem) and so are many other system utilities. Overall, it’s looking good.  Not quite worth 6 years wait, but obviously better than XP, especially for us developers (WPF absolutely kicks GDI32/GDI+ ass!).

Random coolness screenshot – while trying to exit Vista, I got the message as on the screenshot to the right. Turned out Visual Studio 2005 and Document Explorer (the app that shows MSDN Library help) got stuck waiting for each other to exit) and Vista noticed it. Instead of either waiting endlessly for them to exit or silently killing them, it notified me and let me decide. Nice!

Next: installing Ubuntu 6.06 – is Linux still struggling on the desktop or is it ready for widespread use?