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Thursday, February 01, 2007

Yet another Vista review

This is not my first Vista installation - I've been experiencing Vista since the early builds, either on old hardware or on virtual machines. At last I get to install it on my main development station.

My workstation specs are not impressive: I've an old D820, the first dual core generation, with 2GB of RAM and 160GB of disk. It's mounted on my Dell GX520.

The installation almost stopped before it started! Windows installer refused to install on my unformatted SATA disk. I had to partition and format it with an old XP installer. After this silliness, the rest of the installation process was simple and clean.

The only device that wasn't recognized out of the box was audio. I just went to device manager and updated the driver from the internet. Cool, all drivers were now recognized.

After stopping 4 or 5 services I could live without, only 380MB of PF memory usage were reported. It's a report I can live with.

The next step was to ensure I could keep on working: I've downloaded VMPlayer and my booted up my developing virtual machines. I was now ready to work! Thank god for VM!

Finally I've installed Office 2K7, Visual Studio 2K5 and a bunch of utilities, started Outlook, Studio 2K5, Media Player, Messenger and IE. Opened an XP virtual machine where I've opened TOAD, IE and Visual Studio 2K3. Simulated some work over all of those applications and collected the following:

  • Task Manager reported 1.6GB PF usage.
  • Disk usage reported over 20GB of disk just disappeared...
  • The overall experience was great - the VM was responsive, and Media Player kept serving me audio.
I suppose with little help from me Windows can easily suck the remaining 400MB of RAM. Until that day comes, the 2GB will sufice.

Finally a word for the activation process: remembering good old Microsoft at their best, when I tried to activate Vista I was presented with a good old 0x8........ error, and something like "DNS error" as an extended information. It was probably looking for the license server, which we haven't installed yet. I used an MSDN seat licence and the activation worked fine.

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Development Catharsis :: Copyright 2006 Mário Romano