Taking the plunge - Vista 5308

[Dan L]

Should be okay on all but gfx card - needs a minimum of Radeon 9800 by the looks of things, worth a go though I reckon

Anyone else running 5308? Hows the MC component? Does it work with Live TV in the UK?

My other worry is that Powerstrip might not work then I'm stuffed for trying to get 50hz.

I take it you have MSDN at work? I can't get them to subscribe, sadly. My other sources have let me down too

[red_shed2000]

Hey Dan - hope ya okay!

Let us know how you get on, I'm all for a little experimenting!!

Kev

[Dan L]

Originally Posted by DaveP

I take it you have MSDN at work? I can't get them to subscribe, sadly. My other sources have let me down too

I am signed to the Microsoft Connect program for beta testing of Vista/Longhorn Server and IE7. Wish we still were on MSDN at work but boy is it expensive

Installation is complete, obviously I can't go into too much detail but my major problems so far are:

- Display res maxes at 1024x768. Can't seem to find a way around this.
- Powerstrip does not work at all.
- Live TV is too choppy to watch, like it's running very slowly.
- Remote blaster to SKY box does not work correctly - flashes and box receives commands but its not 'feeding' it right - the channel number comes out all wrong on the skybox.

Haven't tried an awful lot else. Need to find a working MPEG2 decoder and see if FFDSHOW will work

PS Hello Kev

[Dan L]

In summary:

Originally Posted by danluton

In summary:

Oh dear!

Was that the 64bit version you were testing?

[Dan L]

Originally Posted by DaveP

Oh dear!

Was that the 64bit version you were testing?

No the 32-bit version.

It may be feature-complete but it ain't useable by any stretch.

[meansizzler]

isn't MSDN like £300 to get new OS's?...

[guido]

Am typing this from Vista 5308

danluton... have you run update? There is one update available: MPEG-2 Codec Pack for Windows Vista... might help you out.

[Dan L]

Originally Posted by guido

Am typing this from Vista 5308

danluton... have you run update? There is one update available: MPEG-2 Codec Pack for Windows Vista... might help you out.

Yeah got that...didn't help - well, Live TV played but it was choppy to the point of unwatchable. I couldn't find anywhere else that had Vista-ready MPEG2 decoders available.

[guido]

New Vista release has also got the new Windows Media 11. Looks quite nice... although havent played with it much yet... you can see a screen shot on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:WMP11.jpg

[ccparkhill]

Few screenshots, inc MCE, here:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase..._galleries.asp

I finally got hold of a copy of 5308 32bit for the desktop.

I had a lot of troule installing it initially. It seemed to kill two disk drives

After the initial install and the first boot the PC would not go past the Bios screen. If I removed the disk it booted OK! I tried another disk and I got exactly the same problem.

I was lucky enough to have a spare external USB drive housing and when I put the disk in that it recognised it immediately and I found the disk had errors when trying to format.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I have just this morning installed it, and only had a few minutes to play with it.

Why do they have to change EVERYTHING! Presumably to promote their training courses!

It isn't looking too good at the moment. My AV software isn't compatible, I tried to play an AVI file and it didn't have the codec. It pointed me at a web site to download it from, and when I installed it, it again said it wasn't compatible. The movie played but was jerky, then again I'm only running on a celeron 2.4

Every time I click on something I get security warnings. The default setup isolates the PC from everything,

In it's favour, I suppose the interface is quite attractive!

I will have to get hold of a TV card before I run the Mdeia Center setup. I'll report back later!

[EliteAV]

I spent quite a few hours over the weekend reviewing/testing the 5308 build.

I installed it on a new partition on my 2nd PC (not the one listed in my sig). This is a new small form factor box with an ASUS A8N-VM CSM motherboard, Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2GB RAM, SATA hard disk & Asus Geforce 6600 PCI Express graphics (+ 6150 on board) with a dual monitor setup with a wired connection to a router.

I made the fatal mistake of installing the 87.x Vista driver from the NVidia website & then spent the next hour trying to get Vista to stay up for more than 10 mins! It may or may not have been connected to the driver, but it crashed/locked up so often that the file system became corrupt. To be honest, I would have to say the current NVidia Vista driver is no more than alpha quality & should probably be avoided.

I then wiped the install & started again, but this time didnt install the Nvidia driver. This resulted in a major improvement to stability & gave me time to explore some of the new features/apps. However, the wasnt a particularly satisfying experience.

The performance (window redraw etc) was poor, but this is to be expected in a beta build.

Windows Media Player 11 - This took 5 hours to add 5000 tracks to its library (WMA Lossless, approx 100GB in total from a NAS file share). This constrasted with approx 1 hour using Media Player 10 under XP. Unfortunately, even when the library update was complete, the app was unusable. Scrolling through the new cover art based view (in Media Player not MCE) was a non starter (i.e. 10 seconds to scroll to next album). Changing the view from All Songs to All Albums caused the app to crash & this was repeatable. Attempting to play a track also caused the app to lock up (even though Vista appeared to be using a driver for the onboard audio). I eventually abandonded this.

MCE - I could only get this to display a black window, so this looks like a graphics driver problem.

IE7 - Functionality seems promising (i.e. tabs) although havent checked whether printing is as improved as promised. Performance (in terms of UI) not too good, but again, this is to be expected.

Printers - Was pleased to find that Vista included a network driver for my HP PSC 2710 multi function printer which is a fairly new model.

Security - Didnt specifically test this but the the user account protection as currently implemented is extremely annoying (almost every action requires a confirmation even when the account has admin rights)

Summary - The new UI is certainly slick, however, as many functions have been relocated/consolidated, it can certainly take time to find out how to perform certain tasks. I dont intend to do any more testing with this build & will wait until Apr for the next one. By then Nvidia should have released a working driver & hopefully the Media Player 11 and MCE issues that I experienced may have been fixed.

I opted to use the supplied nVidia driver and it seemed quite stable but could account for the poor refresh rates.

In MCE I don't like that they have combined photos and videos. I use videos for my AVI files and DVR-MS files that I have taken from "Recorded TV" for long term storage. I also have a few DVD there too but it wouldn't play them.

The lack of backward compatibilty with existing applications is a real PITA.

I too shall give up for now. The final nail in the coffin was the lack of a driver for my Avermedia USB DVB-T TV adapter.