Vista RC1, I'm not impressed.

[wkulecz]

Just installed Windows Vista Ultimate RC1. Not impressive on a AMD 4800+ X2 with 2GB DDR400 and NVidia 5500. Actually the 1920x1080 desktop display is quite impressive, but playback of the included *.wmv sample files is jerky. Image quality was good, but playback smoothness was poor IMHO. Don't know if its an artifact of the wmv encoding used or limitations of the system. If the latter Vista is looking like a pig.

If you have it, see if the water periodically stops flowing in the bear movie or see if your pan is as jerky as I see on the geese movie.

Vista "user experience" rates this machine a "2". Based on this initial out of the box experience, expect hassles with video editing if you are hot for Vista (I'm not, but I needed to see if my code runs there -- it does, but our partner's code which is the front end for ours, has serious display update issues, but works well enough to feed data to us once the installation issues were tediously solved).

Later I'll copy these *.wmv files and see if I can play them on an "old" W2K system or a "current" XP box and report back.

--wally

[wkulecz]

Media Center blue screens!

This system has a pair of BT878 capture cards in it that I use for my Linux (dual boot Ubuntu and Vista RC1) image processing application. Vista semi automatically went to the net to find drivers for them. After I got the "new hardware ready to use" balloon, I tried starting the media center app as I was curious how live video might look. Didn't get far, popped up a splash/setup screen and then BSOD.

I don't think I'll be messing with Vista too much more.

Ubuntu seems to have read-only access to Vista's NTFS by default out of the box. The sample jpegs from Vista also look gorgous in Ubuntu's default jpeg viewer.

Needless to say the codec for this flavor of wmv is not readily available on Linux.

--wally.

[lecter]

Umm, a user experience grade of "2" is VERY low and indicates you must have some major bottleneck on your system...I have a grade of "3" (because my RAM is running at FSB266), but your system should easily be a 4 or a 5. Check your hardware support in Vista...

[wkulecz]

Device manager seems to think everything is fine, although it doesn't seem to recognize the SATA controller on the MB (drive is a Linux Partition).

I'm not motivated to learn to tweak Vista, since its no major issue for my code unless something else in it changes, I'm done with it for now, but it'll mean work (and expense) for our partner if we are to run on Vista.

Just wanted to report a less than stellar out of the box experience on a reasonably powerful machine, but its compents were picked for Linux and the needs of my application.

I think the BSOD in Media Center is a very bad sign at this late date.


The bear.wmv and lake.wmv videos look like crap on W2K after media player downloaded a codec, but this is a weak machine although it does play DV smoothly.

--wally.