• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone (KB936330) 32-bit
• Windows Vista Service Pack 1 Five Language Standalone for x64-based Systems (KB936330)

APC Magazine has a run down of the performance changes in Vista RTM (late 2006 Vista) to Vista RTM Patched (what people are generally running today) and Vista SP1 (what will be running in the very near future)

Whilst General Melchett has been Vista x64 from birth, we Microsoft people were recently given early access to the final Vista Service Pack 1.

Last night, I downloaded the updater. Backed up General Melchett. Double clicked. And watched.

So, firstly a note to all. When the installer says 1. Several Reboots and 2. About an hour — both are highly correct. Please be patient.

After an hour. A restart to the login screen. Service Pack 1 is installed.

Everything is working. Networking, Remote Desktop. It is difficult to quantify any gains quickly: however the formal list of changes is worth a read.

In my research in the continuing overclocking research for GeneralMelchett, I’ve found that 55degC is a little warm for a processor.

The 8800GT is now installed and working well. Just waiting for the two 22″ Dell LCD monitors, external speakers and new GeekDesk for the home GeekSpace and we are go!

Admittedly, GeneralMelchett has been burnt in over the last 5 days (turned on constantly) to ensure stability. The Vista Reliability and Performance Monitor is excellent at viewing the stability of your setup over long periods of time.

So, time for some extra CPU fan (Zallman) and a controllable external 120mm fan.

It seems that the memory is the current weakest link my the chain:

Thanks to the generosity of Jeffa, I scored an old Mini-ATX case with power supply. Yeah, being the junior on the team — I get all the hand-me-downs.

Some hundreds of dollars later from AUSPCMarket, and I have my first ever:

1. AMD based PC (AMD Athlan64 x2 6000+)
2. Gigabyte Motherboard PC (GA-MA69GM-S2H)
3. Self-constructed PC (only a screwdriver required)
4. Media Center PC (Vista Ultimate)
5. Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 8000

Not being a hardware type, the moving of cables, CPUs, fans, more cables and stuff made the physical construction a little longer than an expert. There are still some internal wiring bits to complete: hard disk light at the front and CD audio. Also missed that the our Acer LCD TV has VGA and PC Audio. The cables I purchased were not correct.

The toughest part was installing the power to the SATA DVD/CD drive, and ensuring the CD eject button had enough clearance to work.

The first PATA (this was a surprise!) hard disk was stuffed, so off to plan B with a 500Gb PATA and we’re away. The motherboard would not boot up with this hard disk attached; so the old disk is a throw away.

Using the onboard graphics and USB based TV tuner is probably sub-optimal. Need to fix these.

To add/change

1. Dual channel PCI DVB-T card
2. DivX support (complete at 9:40pm)
3. TV Guide so I can record TV successfully.

Oh, and the cats love the extra space. The case and CPU are quiet and relatively cool. The cave aspect of the case make it a perfect hunting spot:

I just love software: it just keeps getting better, in the field.

JohnG, the nicest man on the planet, willing let me into his house to film another episode of The Geek Stories. Mayling filmed a behind the scenes show… which will be interesting to see, too. Server racks and a compactus in the games room. Now that’s impressive!

So, do you have Australia’s geekiest house?

Surprisingly, even the visuals on this system were a treat. With a three-year-old video card, this system was capable of running Vista’s Aero graphics. But because Aero doesn’t run on Home Basic, I was stuck with the Vista Standard display. It lacks the transparent window borders and whizzy live previews on taskbar buttons, but otherwise the look is indistinguishable from a system running Windows Vista Ultimate.

Summary: no Acrobat 7 support for Vista, only Acrobat 8: with an update expected first half 2007 for full support. There are known issues with Acrobat 8 on Vista. Similarly with Office 2007; the update will have support. You can make PDFs directly from Office 2007 using the Save as PDF and XPS plugin.

For Adobe Creative Suite 2.3: (note that Creative Suite Premium 2.0 with Acrobat Professional 7.0 is not a good combination). For Macromedia Studio 8, the following seems to also apply.

we are not currently aware of major issues that would adversely affect customer use of
Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 on Windows Vista.

In the document, it is worth noting the paragraphs in regards to the forthcoming, pre-announce status Adobe Creative Suite 3.0:

…Adobe Creative Suite 3 is being designed for and thoroughly tested on 32-bit versions of four editions of Windows Vista—Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate.

Adobe Production Studio (video products) seem to install OK, but Vista is not recommended as an OS. EncoreDVD is reported to not work on Vista. Shame, as I was just about to purchase a Production Studio for some Microsoft video projects. 

Altsys/Aldus/Adobe/Altsys/Macromedia/Adobe Freehand? Oooh. Maybe not so good:

Adobe does not plan to update Macromedia FreeHand to install or run on Windows Vista

Do go have a read, and look at the support forums: Vista in Adobe Support Forums.

As a Microsoft Vista and an Intel-based MacBook Pro user, this year is a key year for Adobe products.

My last experience with text recognition was attempting to learn that weird Palm graffiti system. Before that I attempted to yet that Apple Newton stuff working. And l haven’t trained the recognizer yet! The best part of the Newton environment was the programming language, Newtonscript. Dynamic, object oriented and very rich.

Now You ave probably thinking: you have to purchase a Tablet PC thing. Nope, just avail yourself of a WACOM tablet. Bingo. Vista Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate becomes a Tablet PC.

It was also time to swap to Microsoft Expression Web, to complete the Microsoft-centric development environment. Expression Web certainly feels more polished than Visual Web 2005. I hope to spend more time in this app.
Closing the loop on my Thursday experimentation with live.com and Vista Sidebar gadgets: and the result is a new little gadget I am alpha testing: The Neil Finn Lyric Vista gadget.

And it looks sorta like:

Please right-click, save-as a “.gadget”, double-click and drag and enjoy the words of one of the world’s best lyricists. Comments and feature requests more than welcome.

Best starting place for the proverbial Hello World experience for Vista Sidebar gadgets is http://microsoftgadgets.com/Sidebar/DevelopmentOverview.aspx

Daniel Moth, from Microsoft UK has an Excellent screencast on the Channel 9 site at http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=255735.These gets you going on the first part: at least getting your gadget running and drag and droppable.

You will need to do a little more Javascript, as this triggers events that ensure your sidebar gadget works

http://blogs.msdn.com/sidebar/ has some more up-to date info, as the MSDN site is a little behind on updating. I wonder if Microsoft is going to release an Apple Dashcode style of mini development application for widgets? Hope so. Whilst the development process is no more difficult than simple web page design; there are many pieces of wiring that could be made easier with a simple builder.

Peter Jackson to direct “The Hobbit” movie? Oh the horror!

Parallels for Mac is now at build 1910. For those who want to keep their feet in both worlds, you can run Windows XP and Vista at the same time.

Vista RC1++ (alias build 5728), the “show and shine” / “spit and polish” or most correctly, the Rule#12 “Fit and Finish” releases have started.

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta (and the followup Beta 2 Technical Release) is now available for Australians to download. Australia was missing for the first month or so.

I may have killed SVG off too soon, or at least taken an “Adobe-centric” view; and AndrewS comments that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Flash is bogus. Reading some of the posts from the FlashForward Conference, the current, modern mechanism is to use SWFObject.

Waiting for a better video driver (to use up the 256Mb of the MacBook Pro, without resorting to Boot Camp)

Anyway:

Is Vista RC1 build 5600 installed and launched OK. Office 2003 installed perfectly on RC1; now I am hunting down an installer for Office 2007. Dontcha just love software?

Beta Technical Refresh 2 on Beta 2 on Release Candidate 1 on build 2 of Release Candidate 2 on MacOS 10.4.7. Schwarzwaelder Kirschtorte.

Speaking of cakes, Acrobat 8.0 is announced. I don’t have Acrobat 8 in any form, so I cannot add the cherries.

Boot Windows XP to ensure all is OK before I install Vista. Windows XP “seems” to boot a little faster. Unable to quantify exactly how much.

Backup existing 15Gb Windows XP .hdd, just in case. Create a new 15Gb image to install Vista into.

Pararllels settings:

Install into the fresh 15Gb image, 1024Mb of RAM allocated to image. Vista is marked at (experimental) as OS. Installing onto a MacBook Pro with 2Gb of RAM and MacOS X 10.4.7

• Beta 2 Build 5384 DVD (thanks, Frank Arrigo at Microsoft Australia)
• Started install at 11:05am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:35
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:43am
• Questions (location, time, username) at 11:46am
• Vista install auto-restarted at 11:47am
• Into Vista Beta 2 at 11:50am
• Install Parallels Tools from the Parallels VM menu. Note that these don’t seem to be signed drivers, so ignore all the warnings and install away
• Manual Vista Restart
• On restart, if the “Welcome Center” doesn’t appear, choose it from the Start menu. Click on Add Hardware.
• Vista found network card, and automatically configured network. Also note that Vista also finds “PCI Bridge Device” which I asked Vista to ignore
• Restart; Vista found network card, and automatically configured network. Note that the Network Adaptor settings for the Parallels VM set “Bridged” worked OK

In short, it works. Note that I haven’t stress tested this; and the Parallels guys say its experimental. Beta OS on experimental hypervisor virtualization. Your mileage may actually turn into inchage quickly.

RC1 Note from 8:20pm

You cannot install Vista RC1 on Parallels. Bugger. ISO, DVD burnt or upgrade from Beta 2 to RC1. None of these paths work.

***STOP: 0x000000A5 (0x0001000B, 0x50434146, etc)

“The ACPI Bios in this system is not fully compliant to the specification. Please read the Readme.txt for possible workarounds, or contact your system vendor for an updated bios.”