As Microsoft Vista will probably come in at least seven different editions, the enterprise edition seems to be in controversy now.
The Enterprise Edition has the features like Virtual PC and Secure Start up and Full Volume Encryption. To have this, one needs to sign up for Microsoft’s Software Assurance (SA) upgrade and protection program. SA benefits include timely access to software upgrades, 24/7 hot line support, and fee-free cold spares.
However making SA mandatory is making the Enterprise IT admins and users unhappy with whether they can use Enterprise edition or not.
For complete info, check the article from Computer World.
If you wanted to know more about what people wishes to include in Vista aka code name Longhorn, check the following threads:
Microsoft Vista conference call notes by ZDNet‘s David Berlind — Yesterday was my first conference call with Microsoft since finally installing Vista. In fact, since first installing Vista, I’ve reinstalled it about four times. As my testing continues and new builds are released, we’ll continue to do these calls in order to get whatever questions I have answered. During the process, I’m also giving
Another nice writeup from David is Microsoft: Improvements in Vista’s network performance may be frightening (fast).
Today on Vista, it asked me to turn on the automatic updates and I scheduled it for 3.00 AM everyday.
After few minutes got a notification that I have updates and asked to go ahead with express install. After the install is done, it popped up a dialog telling the updates were unsuccessful for my SoundMAX integrated Digital Audio. But it did not display any other info why the installation was unsuccessful. Anyway, I clicked on OK and the Automatic Updates dialog disappeared.
But again after few minutes got the same notification back that I have some updates for my system, and up on clicking on either express or custom install, the same process continues with failed update to the same SoundMax Audio.
I do not know why the above update failed as it is not giving any more info, and even after the failure not sure why it is keep asking me that I have the same updates for the system.
If you want to install Vista as a guest Operating System on your existing OS, you can use any of the following technologies:
Microsoft Virtual PC 2004:
You can find a nice posting from
Anand Iyer a developer of Microsoft on how to install Vista on
Microsoft Virtual PC 2004.
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005:
I tried to install Vista BETA1 on
Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 standard edition, but could not able to do that instead I broke my 2003 server host.
Here is the steps that I did to install Vista on Virtual Server 2005:
- Downloaded the Virtual Server 2005 Standard Edition from MSDN (subscribed one)
- Installed it on my Windows 2003 Server SP1 (Dell Prec 470 – Dual Xeon with HT (acts as 4 CPU), 80GB, 1GB SDRAM, 128 ATI FireGL 3100)
- Created a Virtual Machine of size 20GB with 256 RAM
- Configured the Vista Virual Machine CD-DVD Drive to use the Vista ISO image. You need to copy the ISO image co-located to Virtual additions ISO
- Configured the Virtual Server 2005 RMVC on port 1025
- Started the Vista Virtual machine
- Connected to this Virtual machine using the VMRC client using the connecting string as http://localhost:1025/ and immediately I can see the BIOS and VISTA installer loading
- Once the installer blue screen is running, pressed ‘Shift+F10″ and got the command prompt
- Now using diskpart created a primary NTFS partition on the whole 20GB virtual disk
- After the partition is done, restarted the Virtual machine by resetting it and turning it off
- After the restart, I can see the installer screen back..good so far
- But now when I click on “Install Now” button, it rebounces to the same screen again and again
- So, tried to use ISO mount (using Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel to a drive Z: ) and pointed RMVC client to use that physical drive; but still no luck. Same problem, the installer screen reappears back to install now dialog every time you click on Install Vista button.
- So, gave up on installing Vista on Virtual Server 2005.
Now, I decided to get rid of Virtual Server completely on my system as its not working to install Vista, and uninstalled the same. Even though it did not ask me to reboot, I did to have my clean system back. But it is not booting any more. Even though the boot image loads after that instead of loading the OS, the system recycles back to bios and the process continues like that for ever.
Now booted with 2003 installer CD, and I can see that the disk is now labelled with unpartioned…hmmmm. My guess is, the partition creation that I did within virtual machine might have caused this problem. Must be a bug from Virtual Server when using Vista. Anyway, with this I needed to reinstall the OS as there is no other option left nor I can fix it as the 2003 CD installer also could not identify any existing OS on that disk. I am still trying to get this 2003 server up2date.
VMWare:
I did not tried on VMWare, but if you want to try by yourself, you can use
this post as a starting point.
[Submitted by Ajay Pandey]
Larry Osterman posted in his blog what changes were made to the audio for Vista. Here is the few list of improvements:
- Entire audio stack has been moved from kernel into the user mode, to reduce the amount of code that runs in the kernel
- Changes to the infrastructure to support pro-audio apps, to have better audio quality (Larry will update us on this very soon, stay tuned to his blog)
- Totally revamped UI for audio, Sndvol32 and mmsys.cpl were completely rewritten to include new, higher quality visuals, and to focus on the common tasks that users actually need to do. (we have to wait till BETA2 to see the new UI)
In a side note, I found an issue (not really as this is BETA ) while playing songs with the Real Player on Vista. The player picks the default volumn when the track changes or when the next song is played even when you adjust the volumn in the middle of the song. It seems it picks the volumn level when it loads. But you dont see that in XP or 2003. You can observe the bahaviour
from this low quality AVI video file.
Yet another Yahoo! product which is not fully compatible on Vista after Yahoo! mail and Yahoo! Music Engine, which is nothing but the worlds popular Yahoo! messenger itself. Yahoo! messenger is not fully working on Vista Beta1.
Even though I installed Yahoo! messenger version 7,0,0,426 few days back when I tested Yahoo! music engine on Vista, today I thought of using it on Vista when my XP is used to create a DVD.
I started Messenger and signed in; after signin, I get a blank screen as in this screen shot. That means I could not identify the list of friends who are online now. The messenger allows me to perform all operations to browse and check stock quotes, news and other things.
The messenger also hungs during the signout or trying to play a song from Yahoo! music Launcast and I needed to kill it (YPager.exe) from the Task manager. Atleast now, Yahoo! should seriously consider the compatibility of its products under Vista, else it might loose the base to Google or MSN, whos products does seem to work fine on Vista.
If you are thinking too much about the hardware requirements to deploy Vista (especially RAM and GPU), the Microsoft Vista Hardware Guidance posted very recently should help.
If you want Glassy look of Vista, must go for the vendors listed from the same article, which supports Windows Vista Display Driver Model (formerly known as LDDM), else Windows XP-comparable desktop graphics experience will be provided. Currently Intel, ATI and NVidea has LDDM supported GPUs.
