Introduction

It’s been a month since Microsoft released Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 and we felt it was finally time to take a look at this version of the upcoming OS. If you’re a frequent reader of Krunker, you’ll remember that we took a look at Vista Beta 2 earlier this year. The verdict back then?

Vista Beta 2 is a good step in the positive direction but there’s a lot more work to be done.

Don’t get us wrong – from ten thousand feet up, we liked what we saw in the Beta 2. The user interface under Windows finally got a major upgrade with the introduction of Aero. With Aero in full effect, you got translucency effects, 3D graphics, and animation effects built right into the user interface. The good ol Windows Start Menu got a bit of a makeover under Vista and not only that – Microsoft managed to increase the performance of that menu. Oh yes – search is big.. search is king.. and search is all over in Vista. Here are some other notable improvements under Vista:

  • New security features including the User Account Control
  • Microsoft Gadgets to your desktop
  • Windows Update integrated right into the OS
  • Windows Performance Rating to measure the “performance” of your system
  • New suite of Microsoft applications (think Apple iLife but far less interesting)

So from afar, Vista looked pretty intriguing but once we got closer there were several issues. Here were some to name a few:

  • The OS wasn’t exactly super stable
  • Driver support was lacking
  • Aero was uninspiring and quite frankly – under-performing
  • Application compatibility iffy

So that was Beta 2. How would RC1 fare? Well over the next week or so, we’ll be publishing a series of articles covering Vista RC1. Topics that we’ll be covering include:

  • Installing RC1
  • Vista User Experience
  • Application Compatibility
  • Media Center under RC1 – installing and going over MCE
  • Built in Windows Vista applications suite
  • Windows Security
  • Network performance
  • and much much more (mostly because we can’t think of it off the top of our head at this moment).

We’ll kick off our Windows Vista RC1 coverage by taking a look at the installation process.

Vista all on one DVD

If you were a part of the Windows Vista Customer Preview Program and received Beta 2 then you’re eligible to get a copy of RC1. We got our copy of RC1 via the MSDN subscription network. We simply downloaded the DVD image and then burned it straight to a single DVD disk. As in previous versions of Windows, Vista is segmented into several different versions targeting different markets. However, unlike in previous Windows versions, all the different variants of Windows Vista will ship on the same DVD. That’s right – one DVD for all the different versions of Vista. This greatly simplifies the distribution channel for Microsoft and it also simplifies your upgrade process. Let’s say you have Windows Vista Home Basic installed on your system but you decide later on down the road that you’d like Vista Ultimate. Well that’s easy – just pay the upgrade cost, get the new key, and then pop the same DVD back and install!

So how many different versions (or editions) of Vista are there? There are five in total consisting of:

You can find additional descriptions on the five editions here:

Installing Vista

Before jumping into the installation process, let’s go over the test bed that I used for Vista RC1. It’s a two year old home grown dual processor XEON system running at 2.8GHz. Other important specs include:

It’s definitely not a top of the line system but it’s no slouch either – especially with the dual processor XEONs installed. What I really wanted to know was – how would Vista RC1 perform on a XEON based system that’s a few years old. Although I’ll talk about this later on, I’ll say this much – RC1 performs quite nicely thank you very much!

Our system specs are laid out now let’s begin the installation process shall we? Installing Vista RC1 is a matter of placing the DVD into your DVD drive and then rebooting the system (making sure the computer looks at your DVD drive first before booting from your hard drives). The entire Windows installation process has been greatly simplified compared to the XP days (and we thought XP was a cinch to install!). Installing Windows Vista boils down to the following steps:

  • Configuring some initial settings
  • Entering your product key
  • Selecting whether you are upgrading or installing a new OS from scratch
  • Selecting the partition you want to install Vista to
  • Copying and installing the files
  • Selecting a user name and a computer name
  • Setting up your network
  • Run a performance analysis
  • Finish!

Although there seems to be many steps – there are actually only a few steps that actually require human intervention. These steps are configuring your settings, entering your product key, selecting your partition, selecting some names, choosing your network, and … that’s it.

OK – so we inserted the Vista DVD and we decided to install Windows Ultimate. Why? Why not! Here’s what the initial screen looks like:

Once the files are loaded, you’ll be asked to enter some initial configuration settings such as language to install and time/currency format. Here’s a shot of that:

Once that’s done, we can begin the meat of the installation process by selecting “Install”:

Now first things first – enter your product key!

then read the EULA.. blah blah blah…

Now we’re presented with two options (thank goodness it’s only two!). Perform an upgrade to the OS that’s already on the system OR install a fresh copy of Vista (and also gain some access to the partitions on the hard drives installed). We chose the advanced route which allowed us to install a fresh copy of Vista RC1. One of these days, I’ll install Vista on top of an existing XP install – just not right now.

Once we selected the Custom or Advanced menu item, we’re presented with an overview of our hard drives and partitions. For this install, I’ve decided to merge the two partitions that make up the C drive and then reformat the drive entirely (no worries here – my personal data is backed up AND also stored on drive D). This is all easily done using the UI provided by Microsoft during the Vista install.

Now that our drive is ready, we press NEXT and we’re ready for the Vista install to do its thing. What is that thing you might ask? It boils down to:

  • Copying Windows files
  • Expanding the compressed files
  • Installing features of Vista
  • Installing any updates available
  • and Completing the install

Actually – right before the install is deemed “completed”, Windows will reboot itself. The next screen that comes up after the reboot is as follows:

followed by the completing installation screen:

Now comes some of the fluff. We’re asked to pick a user name, a picture, and a computer name.

After this, we perform some last minute system configuration:

followed by the welcome screen and a performance analysis (during the performance analysis, you’ll be presented with some nice Microsoft advertisment of their new Vista OS):

We’re now nearing the end folks.. here are some of the final screen shots:

And finally – we see our beloved Vista desktop:

For those of you curious as to what my desktop currently looks like – here you go. Note – the screenshot here spans two 19 inch monitors.

Ok.. going back to the setup process again. After the final reboot, I’m presented with my brand spanking new Windows Vista desktop. It’s at this point where Vista will attempt to install additional drivers for any unidentified hardware. Vista does a good job for the most part.. except for one particular piece of hardware which I will describe in the next section – the DVICO FusionHDTV 5 RT Gold.

My particular setup uses two 19 inch monitors. Vista did not automatically enable the second monitor during the installation process although it did recognize it. All I had to do was go into the “Display Settings” to enable the second monitor.

Dealing with the DVICO FusionHDTV 5 RT Gold

So the Vista RC1 installation was finished – everything worked just fine right? Well.. not quite. Once I rebooted the system and logged into Vista, I was immediately notified that some devices were not installed. I didn’t have to look at the device manager to figure out which piece of hardware was troubling me – it had to be the DVICO FusionHDTV 5 RT Gold PCI card. (Why is it that these DVICO cards always give me trouble huh?) The DVICO card worked under Beta 2 after much fiddling – thus I figured it would work just fine under RC1. Well.. it wasn’t quite so easy.

If you don’t own this HDTV tuner card, then you can easily skip this section since this is entirely specific to the DVICO card (but it does tell you how much of a pain driver support can be under Vista).

I initially obtained the latest drivers for the card from the DVICO site located here. The version that I initially tried was 3.41. After downloading the 52MB package, I proceeded to launch the install. The setup program successfully installed the FusionHDTV application software but it failed to install the device drivers. No problem here I thought. Once the setup application was run, the device drivers would be copied into the DVICO program files folder. I could always direct Windows to install the device drivers from that directory through device manager. How does that work? Go into Device Manager, pick the unknown device (a multimedia device here), right click it to bring up the context menu and select the “Update Driver Software” menu item. You can then specify the location of the driver software. Unfortunately, three drivers are installed for the DVICO card – none of which were the ATSC tuner driver. Just great.

I was left to wonder what could have gone wrong. After several installs and uninstalls, I was mystified as to what I would need to do to get the card working. The real pisser was – the card used to work under Beta 2 but not under RC1. I even mucked with the compatibility feature for the setup app – making the program think it was installing within a Windows XP SP2 OS. That didn’t quite work either.

After nearly an entire night of trying to get the card to work, I decided to try one last idea. Why not try an older version of the driver? Version 3.41 was released in late June – way after Beta 2 came out. Why not take a look at the driver before that date which was marked as version 3.30.01 released in February? I promptly downloaded that 50 MB package and attempted to install the entire system. This time, the installation process worked like a charm. All five FusionHDTV devices within device manager were identified and installed. Wow.. I actually had it working!

I verified that the drivers worked by launching Windows Media Center and running the setup process. Sure enough – the digital tuner was found and I was off and running tuning to over the air HDTV stations.

Some of you might wonder why I even cared so much about this tuner card. It’s simple – I really would like to use Media Center under Vista RC1. If it wasn’t for Media Center, I’d be much less interested in Vista and of course I’d rip the DVICO card right out of the system!

Note – I removed the startup shortcuts to the FusionHDTV applications by running msconfig. Since I’ll be using MCE and not the FusionHDTV software, there was no reason for me to actually load their software at startup.

All systems go!

There you have it – A fully installed Windows Vista RC1 system from scratch. The total install time (minus the FusionHDTV debacle) was approximately 45 minutes for my machine. I’m convinced that I can bring this down to about 35 minutes – especially since I know what to do for my hardware now. Your installation time will vary so don’t be surprised if it takes upwards of 90 minutes to get things up and running. Another important aspect to note is – this was a fresh install. I didn’t test what it would be like to install the OS as an upgrade to an existing OS installation (like Windows XP). I do have a Media Center system that I’m tempted to install Vista on.. but I really want to record the MLB playoffs right now so perhaps this test can wait.

All things considered, the Vista installation process was fairly painless. Here are a couple of things that I’d recommend you do before installing Vista on your own.

  • Perform an inventory check on your hardware. If you’re running Windows, open up Device Manager and take a look at all the hardware that it’s identified.
  • If you can, go to the hardware manufacturer’s website, and see if you can find Vista drivers for the hardware. You’re better off downloading the drivers BEFORE you install Vista – just in case Vista doesn’t recognize your network interface card (that would suck!)
  • Perform an inventory check on the applications that you regularly use. Check those applications with Microsoft to see if there are any application compatibility issues under Vista (we bet there will be some!)
  • Finally – make sure your hardware is beefy enough to handle Vista. If your system is relatively new, then you’ll probably be ok with your system processor. However, be aware of your graphics card. If you plan on using Aero, you might want to consider putting aside some cash for a new graphics card if need be.

As you’ve seen in this article, running the Windows Vista installation process was fairly straight forward, painless, and relatively fast. However getting all of your hardware to work just right under Vista is a totally different story. Microsoft should be commended in simplifying the initial software install. Let’s just hope that most of the hardware will be supported in the final iteration of Vista (IMPORTANT NOTE – RC1 does contain many, many, MANY more device drivers than in Beta 2).

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