I had my first encounter with Windows Vista Beta 2 today. Managed to get hold of the 32 and 64 bit version from the heavily loaded Windows Vista website, one can wonder why Microsoft didn't choose to use something like Bittorrent for distributing the 3 and 4 GB DVD images. Instead they choose http which can slow down even the mightiest server networks. Ah well.

After burning the 64bit version I dug up a spare harddrive to be sacrificed to the vims of Vista. A somewhat used 160GB Hitashi drive was selected. It was quicking plugged into a spare SATA connector and the BIOS was rearranged to allow it to boot first instead of my WinXP RAID0 array. Yes, I know, a bit risky leaving my working system connected when testing a beta OS, but I felt lucky

When the BIOS was correctly configured, I booted the fresh DVD with Windows Vista Beta 2 x64. I was quickly shown a screen which resembles the one Windows 2000 Pro shows when booting. You know, the black screen with a white bar at the bottom telling me it's loading. Well, after the bar was filled, it switched over to a WinXP like bootscreen but with the progressindicator only.

A few more seconds and I was dumped into a spartan but functional GUI enviroment and thus the adventure begins.

I have to say that this is the slickest installer yet. Very little interaction is required by the user and the interface is familiar to anyone who has used a Windows system since Windows 95. You get to select install and get prompted for the program key (which is obtained from the microsoft website).

Then it shows a list of drives where you can install Vista. It also allows you to manipulate partitions (create new, expand, delete, format). But to my surprise, no drives were shown. It turns out that since I use the nForce4 RAID controller, I need to load some additional drivers. But don't worry, Microsoft has finally taken a hint and you can load drivers from CD, Floppy and USB devices. In short, I just placed the needed drivers from nVidia on a USB memorystick and connected it, pressed load drivers and presto, I was shown a list of compatible devices.

One word, slick! This is something that most users that install windows themselves have been craving for many years now. Especially if you're used to Linux (or BSD) where you can open up another console and just load the missing drivers (if they haven't been detected and loaded already, which they usually have been).

Anyway, all was not rosy, since I was shown three different RAID controllers, all with more or less the same name, and all pointing to the same .inf file. Very confusing. I just selected one at random which seemed to work. Atleast, my drives popped up a minute later.

After removing the old partitions on the hitachi drive, I created a new one which encompassed the entire drive, I did not, however, format it, I just pressed next. That was a bit unnerving since Vista didn't ask me anything or warn me. I'd expect it to confirm my drive selection so I didn't unadvertedly install on the WinXP RAID0 drive.

Then followed a tedious 30 minutes of staring at a screen where three dots were blinking for each operation that the installer was working on. There was a percentage, which indicated how fargone the current operation was, but it felt a bit inadequate. I would have liked some rough timeestimate or something. Luckily I have a laptop aswell and I was able to surf/email/watch movies on it while waiting. Even if I complained about feedback, it's still a big step forward since you now can start the install and walk away and hopefully return to an installed system.

I say hopefully, because in my case, this wasn't true.

The installer warns you that during the install, the system will restart several times, which it did… Once… Then my computer hang at bootup (didn't even POST) and just blared its internal speaker. WTF?!

It would seem that the new "reboot"-code is buggy and for some reason makes my computer forget that it has an IDE interface, and thus the motherboard won't POST since the harddrive controller doesn't respond. NASTY! A quick press of the reset button and things were booting up again… Or so I thought.

After booting up to the installscreen again, the installer continued its dirty work when the mighty Blue Screen Of Death struck. Annoyed by this I once again pressed reset and this time Vista wouldn't boot. It claimed that the nVidia RAID controller driver was malfunctioning and that I should try to repair my system using the DVD.

Which I tried, only to find that the repair function couldn't find any drives on my system, not even after loading the same drivers from the USB memory.

ARGH!

Back to BIOS and meddle some with the RAID options. I simply disabled RAID and the SATA drives on which the RAID0 set was installed. Then I booted again, this time not requiring the RAID driver and thus was able to continue booting Vista using regular IDE drivers.

Hurray! Vista was continuing the installation, now prompting me for langauge settings. After selecting those and creating my admin account, I logged on for the first time, and it does look very sleek and smooth. Many new small graphical features aspire to dazzle you, and let me tell you, they succeed very well at that. The windows popup and disappear in a very slick manor, and the frosted window frames are really cool to look at.

Time to install my networkcard so I can get the correct display drivers running (for some reason Vista had chosen to make GeForce 6200 my primary card, even though it's not the one used by BIOS or the installer… weird). That's when I found out that there is no specific driver with the ForceWare package for Vista. It is supposed to be installed with the OS by default.

Not so … My guess is that the installer only came halfway through since it BSOD on me, but no matter how much I prodded Vista could I get it to install the driver from DVD.

That, combined with the constant hanging during POST when rebooting resulted in me putting the Vista plans on hold for a while.

I need to do a more serious installation attempt, where I remove my RAID set and place the testdrive on the first SATA connector and try a fresh install without RAID enabled. But it's getting really late and I'm tired so that's something for another rainy day.

The little I saw of Windows Vista looked very nice, and WinXP Pro 64bit was a pleasent experience when I tried it, so I'll be sure to give Vista a second try, with a bit more feeling the next time.