Ok, that was a groaner.
The latest build of Vista 5365 looks pretty damn good. I have actually had it on my primary work laptop for 4 days now. The last two builds lasted less than an hour! (Thank The Nine for Ghost!)
(Ok, I can't believe I just made an unintentional Oblivion reference. I guess 45 hours of game play in a few weeks is a little much.)
Back to Vista. I have a Dell D800 at work and 5365 has been working great. I have a few issues I have not been able to get around. I cannot use VS2005 to connect to SQL Express. It keeps telling me that it cannot start an instanced of SQL Express. I think it has to do with UAP (user access protection), but I tried to run VS elevated and it made no difference. I guess I should try it as the actual 'Administrator' account.
I am also having trouble getting Remedy AR User 6.3 installed. It comes as an SFX that then launches setup.exe with a special .ini file. If I run the SFX in XP compatibility mode, setup.exe still knows it is in Vista and bails. But If I try to run setup.exe myself (by copying over the files before closing the SFX), the XP compatibility stuff works, but it cannot find all of its files. I guess I need to figure out how to pass the provided .ini file to setup. Other then that things are good to go.
I still have not made the jump on my Dell XPS at home. Last time I tried, Aero looked great, but so many applications either turned Aero off (with a bunch of screen flashing and video mode changing) or just out right crashed that I only had it on my XPS for about 4 hours last time. I would have suffered through it longer but I went to a web paged that needed Quick Time and I let it install and when it tried to load the system locked hard. When I tried to reboot, the partition was corrupt. NICE. Again, thank The Nine for Ghost.
That Of course brings me to another problem with my XPS and Vista. My XPS came with Ghost (from Symantec) and normally all you have to do is hit Ctrl-F10 or some such during boot and it will let to re-image your system just like the day you got it. Well, it turns out that is reliant on the boot-sector and once Vista is installed, that process is no longer available. I had to build a BartPE CD with my SATA-RAID drivers and run the rebuild process manually.