So, this afternoon I bit the bullet. My Mandriva Linux 2005 partition is no more, replaced instead with a Windows Vista partition.

My first impression? Quite favourable, actually. The installation process was painless, and it automatically detected my existing XP SP2 partition & installed a boot loader so I could dual boot between versions of Windows.

Upon installation, I noticed a few things. Firstly, & most obviously, there was the new Aero UI with 'glass'. I had expected that the new graphical shininess would grate on my nerves in the same way that XP did - but in fact it has a polished, professional feel to it that's quite unlike the clownish experience of the default XP theme.

The performace is also, well, acceptable. I have 512MB RAM, a 128MB GeForce 6600GT and a 2.8GHz P4 CPU. I'll grant you, it's slow in places & thrashes the hard drive a bit, but that's probably more to do with the antique 20GB hard drive I've used for the Vista partition. Altogether though it's perfectly acceptable performance for a beta build that's presumably got a bunch of debugging cruft attached.

The installation process also correctly identified most of my hardware. The only issues I had were with my 56k analog modem, my HP3940 printer, and the SoundMAX on-motherboard audio.

The 56k modem was easy enough to deal with; I simply had to select the generic 56k analog modem driver from a list, and and away it went. I also had to dismiss a few User Account Control dialogs prompting me that the action I was performing required administrator privileges - finally we have a non-privileged default user model in a Microsoft operating system!

As for the SoundMAX audio, this proved more of a problem. For starters, Asus don't offer Vista driver downloads from their website (or if they do, they're buried somewhere on the site so I couldn't find them), so my attempt to simply download a driver set for the P4P800 motherboard was stymied. However, I instructed Windows to search for drivers online, and was several minutes later rewarded with functional audio.

Buoyed by this success, I went hunting for some HP drivers. I tried getting Vista to perform an online search, but that failed. Unlike Asus (whose website seems largely devoid of info on Vista), the HP website has a few pages devoted to Windows Vista - unfortunately, they were full of marketing-speak and devoid of useful driver downloads. So, I thought I'd perform my own readiness test: I sent both HP, and Bond & Bond (the store from which I bought the printer) the following email ...

Hi,

Some months ago I purchased a new HP DeskJet 3940 from Bond & Bond St. Lukes. It's been working fine under Windows XP SP2, but I can't get it working under Windows Vista Beta 2 (build 5384).

Are there Vista drivers available for this printer, or a sufficiently similar model that I can get it working? I haven't been able to find anything on the HP website, & the Windows Vista device manager failed to automatically find & download drivers from Microsoft.

Thanks in advance for any help your can provide.

Yours,
Duncan Bayne

The rest of my usual software loadout installed fine - so far I have OpenOffice 2.0, FireFox 1.5, and CA's anti-virus suite installed. In fact, you should vist the CA website, as they're offering a one-year license of their anti-virus software to those souls brave enough to be running a Vista beta - I guess they want the feedback from users on the bleeding edge.

So, I'll be using Vista to put together a presentation on test-driven development of GUIs, which I will be giving to the Auckland DNUG (and possibly other DNUGs) at a yet to be determined time. In order to achieve that, I'll need to set up Vista for development; so tomorrow evening, I'll be installing Visual Studio Express, NUnit, NUnitForms, and FxCop.

Let the fun begin ...