Well, I got Vista 64 RC2 install and all running good. Even works with my QUake 3 and Unreal Tournament 2004. With my new video card and system, Unreal Tournament 2004 looks great! Much more details than my old GeForce 4 TI4200 card. Also installed FarCry as it came with my video card. The FarCry patch though, crashed towards the end of the process.
I now have my Mozilla Thunderbird mail installed along with Firefox. Much to my surprise, I was able to copy my Thunderbird profile information on my old system over the top of the information Thunderbird created on my new system and all my 20+ email accounts and ton of message rules all worked without a hitch! Good going Mozilla, this was always a problem moving to a new system and new version of Outlook in the past which was one of the reasons I first started using Thunderbird.
Anyway, the road to installing my development tools started yesterday. Upon beginning to install "Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005 Advanced", I was greeted with a message that this version of the OS had compatibility issues with the program and that I should first run SQL server 2005 service pack 2 before using the product. After a few minutes of searching, I found that SP2 is not available yet, so I just ignored it and plugged along.
The install all went well except for the reports part accessing IIS 7 which appears to failed a couple of times. I will wait and see if this causes problems down the road.
The database appeared to work okay until I tried to attach one of my many database files at which time it barked out an error of:
The server principal "my server" is not able to access the databae "model" under the current security context. (Microsoft SQL server, Error: 916)
A quick check of the net found this blog post:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlexpress/archive/2006/10/11/ getting-things-working-on-vista-aka-dealing- with-user-account-control.aspx
It seems the new Vista User Account Control (UAC) is getting in the way and you need to create a login for your Windows user account via the SQL Server 2005 management studio express program giving you the SysAdmin role. Did that and it appears to work.
At this point I now have Visual Studio Standard installed and have setup the system to allow multiple websites in IIS using different names based off a custom host file. From what I can see it is all running good.
After installed Quicken 2006, it seemed to be okay and updated itself over the Internet, but would crash every time I went to open a file when it tried to browse for the file. I double clicked on my file outside of Quicken and it brought up Quicken and appeared to work.
Adobe Photoshop 7 also seems to have installed and is working good. Was concerned with it being a much older version, but so far so good.
Have no problems with Microsoft Office 2007 Beta nor Open Office. Both seem to work fine on Vista.
Tomorrow it is time to start working with Visual Studio and building a few projects to see how compatible it it with Vista. Hopefully things will work without any nasty problems popping up.
One little note, my wife likes to play a variety of low budget games. So far she has had to set the compatiblity level to Windows XP and use the "Run As Adminstrator" option for a few of them to work.There is one more little problem I have run into and that is with the Hibernate mode, once the system comes back up my local lan connection is usually disconnected. Normally, I right click on the network icon and select Diagnose/repair which shortly gives me the option to reset the connection, which gets me connected again. Not a biggy, but annoying.
Here is a summary of the software I currently have working on Vista (or at least it appears to be):
- Quicken 2006
- SQL Server Express 2005 + Management console
- Visual Studio 2005 Standard
- Adobe Photoshop V7
- Open Office
- Microsoft Office 2007 beta
- Expresso (Regular Expression work tool)
- Reflector (Disassembler)
- WinZip
- e-Sword Bible Software
- Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird
- Unreal Tournament 2004
- Quake 3 team arena
- FarCry
- Nero Express 6.6