Vista Ultimate RC-1

[jflan]

Sent for a hard copy a while back and it showed up on my doorstep last Wednesday.
It's a customer preview that will time out in June 2007 I believe.

This is the most beautiful GUI that I have ever seen. Yep, eye candy.
Haven't done anything with it but explore the OS.
I have it triple-booting with XP and SuSE. Need to sort my bootloader situation a bit and then I'll exercise Vista some more.

JF

[Tortanick]

Can you install a windows boot loader to the partitions MBR rather than the hard drives MBR? if so Grub can chainload no problem

[jflan]

I think that GRUB is doing its job but Vista wants to dual-boot with XP.
I can't go directly to XP. I get a DOS screen that says:

chainloader (hd0, 3)+1

I hoping that all I need to do is edit Vista's and XP's boot.ini's and then possibly only have to reload/repair GRUB from YaST.

JF
Who can strike keys 37x faster than he can think :D

[jflan]

No more boot.ini
See here:
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=6600
If I had to do it over, I think I would have installed Vista on a separate HD with my first HD disconnected and then let GRUB have it.

[jflan]

I've sorted my booting situation for the most part and now I've finally got my wireless up.
I'm using a Linksys WMP54G PCI card that has no official Vista driver.
It uses a Ralink chip, so the solution was to go to Ralink via XP and download the installer, drivers and utility from there.
Back in Vista I was able to access the download package from XP and install it.

After a few minor hiccups everthing worked.
I can't get over how huge Vista is. Took up 10GB!

Also, I'm amazed at how fast Firefox loads. There's got to be a preloader in the background?
The beast itself is fast to boot up and shut down on my aging machine.

JF
Edit: Boot 20 sec
Shutdown 15 sec
Firefox 02

[Rich-M]

Damn I have to try again as I have a Usr wireless and I could not load that for anything which made me delete this Rc1. Beta 2 worked fine with the same Usr Wireless adapter.