if anyone still wondering

If anyone with an old(er) Dell is still wondering whether kicking the tires on Vista is worth it or not I hope to shed some light on it here.
I finally downloaded a good ISO while tired of waiting for the DVD to arrive in the mail, and installed Vista. I was really apprehensive about it especially after finding out, through the Vista advisor program that I would need to find manufacturer's vista drivers for my Samsung multi-function printer, CNet Pro 200WL Ethernet card and SB Live! Sound card.
Of course, these three manufacturers have no Vista drivers for my devices nor do they plan on making any according to emails I received. But I went ahead and installed Vista anyways just to see what the fuss was all about.
The install went smoothly (thanks to all the people here for their tips, esp. Andre, for checking the MD5 hash and burning at slowest speed) and before too long I was logging into Vista. Having an older GeForce Ti4200 64MB video card does not allow me to have Aero Glass or Flip 3D so I'm stuck with what looks like a crappy visual interface - I hope MSFT will change the Vista Basic look to something better.
Here is where my fears started to get realised. I had hoped that even without vista drivers, my Ethernet card would at least install under some kind of generic (emulation) vista driver to get online and fix everything. Didn't happen. So I started searching for CNet Pro 200WL XP drivers and finally found them here http://www.cnetusa.com/newwebsite/techsupport/driverdownload.htm
I simply unzipped the driver file to a folder on my desktop and then added the driver manually through Vista device manager. It worked like a charm.
Secondly, a tip from someone here mentioning Creative NGO modified drivers for Vista also worked great with my old SB Live Value card however the game port did not get recognised - very minor issue as I don't even use the port for anything.
And finally, once online, Vista searched and installed drivers through Windows update for my Samsung multi- function printer and that also worked great.
After that I installed some of my applications to see how far I can get, and I must say I'm very impressed. WinRAR, RoboForm, as well as Foxit Reader (PDF reader replacing the bloated Adobe Acrobat Reader) all worked flawlessly.
I installed PhotoShop Elements 4, despite getting a warning during install for incompatibility issues, along with Noise Ninja plug-in for it and both seem to be working fine so far. I've done some photo editing work for the past day or so without any issues.
AVG anti-virus free version gave me a big flag not to install due to known issues with Vista so I skipped it in favour of Avast (as recommended by some here) and that worked great.
My only few issues so far have been a couple of instances where a program stopped responding but its very infrequent and I haven't been able to reproduce it at will. Also, my ipod which I occasionally use as a removable storage, when I click the Remove USB device in the system tray to disconnect it, it does not disconnect even though it shows it as disconnected in Vista.
I was a little concerned too about speed. It seems very sluggish overall compared to XP. At times it would take 10 seconds just to open Computer (My Computer in XP opens in 1 sec). Also, it has 44 or so services running at start up and about 450MB-500MB of memory being used compared to XP - 20 services and 140MB of memory at start up.
I am however completely impressed by Vista Beta 2 and I'd like to take back my earlier comments about it being unpolished and too early for public consumption. Given the way it’s running on my four year old Dell, and its code not being optimized yet, I'd like to take my hat off to MSFT. I'm eagerly awaiting its release.
Sorry for the lengthy post.

Sorry for the lengthy post.

MS should say the same about the length of the bloated code...
"Rob" wrote in message

If anyone with an old(er) Dell is still wondering whether kicking the tires on Vista is worth it or not I hope to shed some light on it here.
I finally downloaded a good ISO while tired of waiting for the DVD to arrive in the mail, and installed Vista. I was really apprehensive about it especially after finding out, through the Vista advisor program that I would need to find manufacturer's vista drivers for my Samsung multi-function printer, CNet Pro 200WL Ethernet card and SB Live! Sound card.
Of course, these three manufacturers have no Vista drivers for my devices nor do they plan on making any according to emails I received. But I went ahead and installed Vista anyways just to see what the fuss was all about.
The install went smoothly (thanks to all the people here for their tips, esp. Andre, for checking the MD5 hash and burning at slowest speed) and before too long I was logging into Vista. Having an older GeForce Ti4200 64MB video card does not allow me to have Aero Glass or Flip 3D so I'm stuck with what looks like a crappy visual interface - I hope MSFT will change the Vista Basic look to something better.
Here is where my fears started to get realised. I had hoped that even without vista drivers, my Ethernet card would at least install under some kind of generic (emulation) vista driver to get online and fix everything. Didn't happen. So I started searching for CNet Pro 200WL XP drivers and finally found them here http://www.cnetusa.com/newwebsite/techsupport/driverdownload.htm
I simply unzipped the driver file to a folder on my desktop and then added the driver manually through Vista device manager. It worked like a charm.
Secondly, a tip from someone here mentioning Creative NGO modified drivers for Vista also worked great with my old SB Live Value card however the game port did not get recognised - very minor issue as I don't even use the port for anything.
And finally, once online, Vista searched and installed drivers through Windows update for my Samsung multi- function printer and that also worked great.
After that I installed some of my applications to see how far I can get, and I must say I'm very impressed. WinRAR, RoboForm, as well as Foxit Reader (PDF reader replacing the bloated Adobe Acrobat Reader) all worked flawlessly.
I installed PhotoShop Elements 4, despite getting a warning during install for incompatibility issues, along with Noise Ninja plug-in for it and both seem to be working fine so far. I've done some photo editing work for the past day or so without any issues.
AVG anti-virus free version gave me a big flag not to install due to known issues with Vista so I skipped it in favour of Avast (as recommended by some here) and that worked great.
My only few issues so far have been a couple of instances where a program stopped responding but its very infrequent and I haven't been able to reproduce it at will. Also, my ipod which I occasionally use as a removable storage, when I click the Remove USB device in the system tray to disconnect it, it does not disconnect even though it shows it as disconnected in Vista.
I was a little concerned too about speed. It seems very sluggish overall compared to XP. At times it would take 10 seconds just to open Computer (My Computer in XP opens in 1 sec). Also, it has 44 or so services running at start up and about 450MB-500MB of memory being used compared to XP - 20 services and 140MB of memory at start up.
I am however completely impressed by Vista Beta 2 and I'd like to take back my earlier comments about it being unpolished and too early for public consumption. Given the way it's running on my four year old Dell, and its code not being optimized yet, I'd like to take my hat off to MSFT. I'm eagerly awaiting its release.
Sorry for the lengthy post.

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 19:27:54 +0300, "John Jay Smith" <-> wrote:

Sorry for the lengthy post.
MS should say the same about the length of the bloated code...

Mr Smith, It sounds as though you're an experienced OS coder. How many have you done?
snip

5 trillion....
"milleron" wrote in message

On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 19:27:54 +0300, "John Jay Smith" <-> wrote:
Sorry for the lengthy post.
MS should say the same about the length of the bloated code...
Mr Smith, It sounds as though you're an experienced OS coder. How many have you done?
snip

So, it sounds as though you can't get it right, either. When you do one that works, then we'll listen to your opinions on what constitutes bloated code.
On Mon, 26 Jun 2006 01:16:15 +0300, "John Jay Smith" <-> wrote:

5 trillion....
"milleron" wrote in message On Sun, 25 Jun 2006 19:27:54 +0300, "John Jay Smith" <-> wrote:
Sorry for the lengthy post.
MS should say the same about the length of the bloated code...
Mr Smith, It sounds as though you're an experienced OS coder. How many have you done?
snip