Well I'm sitting here browsing the boards from the comfort of my Lazyboy and my DLP. Took an old spare hdd and put that new public beta of Visa on it and I like it!

As some of you know I'm a HTPC nut and I normall run MCE 2005 on this box but I've been excited for Vista MCE so I jumped at the chance to try it out. With Vista's hardware requirements being pretty steep I wasn't sure what to expect but everything seems to work pretty good. I've only had this box up and running for a couple hours now but I'll keep anyone interested up to date on things as I experience em.

One thing for sure, its damn pretty... all of it, from Aero to the new MCE interface.

Hmmmmmmm,.........when our old computer died and my Son built me a new computer, part of what he installed was the capability to do just such fun stuff!!

He only needs to run some new wires and cables and I'll be able to sit in the ol' Lazy-Boy with the 65" Mits arrayed out right in front of me as well!

You should have seen the looks on the faces of the Wife and kids when THAT was mentioned.

I suspect the cables and such will be a long time in a-comming. (I'll be watching this thread for some pitfalls to avoid....if I ever need to avoid them.)
Rich.

Well initial impressions of Vista and more specifically Vista MCE.

I like it. It feels modern, futuristic, whatever but I'm glad the interface has finnaly gone 3D. Aero Glass is cool and works well on my 6600 (HTPC) and 7800GT (Gamming box) systems.

Speed isn't too bad, seems to go to the hard drive a lot but I've just installed it on some old 15G and 30G hdds I had laying around so that could be part of the issue there. Both systems *only* have 1Gig of ram and they say Vista likes to see 2Gigs. But overall its running pretty well, esp on my *lesser* box which is a P4 3ghz.

Vista MCE. All I can say is WOW. The downside is there really isn't anything revolutionary from the previous MCE 2005 version. What is so great is the polishing they've done to everything that was in MCE 2005. The navigation is better and the music library is TO DIE FOR. I'm debating if beta testing this guy full time on my HTPC is worth it for that alone. I donno if anyone has used MCE 2005 much for music or read about the changes in Vista MCE but for me they are the coolest thing ever. MCE 2005 ruined CD's for me because of how easy it was to listen to whatever I wanted and in whatever order (on the fly playlists) but Vista MCE has taken that to a new level. The presentation has changed by adding a couple additional ways to browse by date and album artist making browsing your music exciting every time and even easier to find what you want. All the existing ways are still there too including by artist, album and genre but everything scrolls side to side now instead of up and down which is really great for widescreen HDTVs. And its even more pretty then MCE 2005.

Vista MCE now includes a MPEG2 decoder so you don't need to buy one separately. That said I've been using the Nvidia one on my MCE 2005 system because it works with my 6600 to give me all the postprocessing features of PUREVIDEO so I'll have to see what the quality differences are between the systems for TV and Movies.

The system does seem pretty stable overall but I was able to get the MCE interface to lockup but after patiently waiting on the OS I was able to end task it and restart. Oh well they got 6+ months to continue to tweak.

Ben, I really appreciate you sharing your impressions.

I think 2G of RAM is nuts. How many motherboards even support that right now?

It seems to me that the more M*soft requires these hurculean amounts of resources, the more impetus there is for people to develop similar applications in *nix.

Most current Mobos will take 4gigs nowadays, but I agree with you Tom.

Slightly OT but the HTPC caught my eye. I have a Logitech 5500 5.1 sound system for my PC and it came with a set of RCA-to-1/8" stereo cables to connect to my sound card. It is really nice because the 1/8" plugs match the colors on the jacks on my sound card, and the RCA plugs are colored in the 'surround sound' scheme. I do not have digital output on my sound card, but I would like to tote the PC into the HT and hook it up to the 5.1 inputs on my receiver. Does any one know where I can get an extra set of cables like this? 8-10' would be ideal so I could leave them hanging off the A/V. No dice on monoprice and Logitech doesn't seem to sell parts this way.

-Brian n8wrl

hmm, not sure if I can visualize exactly what you have. You talking connect the PC to the Logitech speakers then to the AVR? Some modern soundcards actually have 6 channel output that I assume you could connect to the 6 channel input on a AVR.

Well, I don't think 2Gig is all that terrible. Vista has been in development for a while now, almost purposely allowing the market to ramp up hardware. 1Gig is really about the min you want on XP anyway and its a 4 year old OS already.

Vista will run on 1Gig just fine, just as XP will run on 512MB. Its just if you run lots of program you will want more. Video card is going to be the killer for most with Vista since you need a fully compatible DX9 card. Most integrated video cards won't cut it (ie those 300$ Dells folks have been buying for the last couple years). Basically Vista will be best on a new PC. I don't forsee Vista being a hot upgrade OS.

Sorry I'm late on this. Yes, that is right - the sound card has 3 stereo output jacks that carry L+R, SL+SR, C+LFE. The cable the Logitech came with has plugs for these three jacks with the right colors, and 6 RCA's at the other end to connect to colored RCA jacks on the Logitech.

What I'd like to do is get another cable just like this so I can hook the RCA's into the 5.1 analog input on my A/V and plug the stereo plug-end into my sound card when I tote my PC into the living room. The Logitech stays disconnected in my office. That, plus DVI to the Plasma and I can see how Quake4 looks and sounds on the HT.

Does that make sense? Can't find this cable...

-Brian n8wrl

OK, that makes sense... can't you just get something similar to this, but just 3 of them to break out the 1.8" jacks to RCA?

I just upgraded to Vista Beta 2 a couple of days ago and have been pleasantly surprised so far -- it's come a long way in the last year. Graphics card definitely makes a big difference -- I'm running a Radeon 9800 on a 1.6 GHz P4 with 512 MB of RAM and and a REALLY old 20 MB hard disk, and the performance is actually pretty decent. It sure does like that disk drive, as others have said, although obviously more RAM or a non-stone-age drive would help.

The performance ratings are funny -- my graphics card gets a "5.8" and nearly everything else is under "2", so WinSAT grudgingly gave me a "2" for the whole system and turned on the AeroGlass interface.

In windows XP I have a separate page file partition set up - about 2 gigs or so.

I think with Windows Vista that would help even more so than with Windows XP, especially with file fragmentation. I need to buy some DVD-R's to burn in by brand spakin' new DVD burner, then I'll see.

What i've learned with vista is to install it on a COMPLETELY different hard drive if you plan on dual booting with XP. And, when you install it, unplug your XP drive. That way, it wont mess with any booting options and commandere your XP's boot.ini. I had that happen, wasn't fun when I wanted to nuke Vista after I was done playing with it (back then it was beta 1).

The boot.ini is pretty easy to edit yourself. It's just a text file that tells your computer what partitions it can find bootable OSes on.

Yea, it did something else though, I edited it so that no mention of Vista was in there, and somehow it kept popping back. Did something to some Win XP file I think.

The NT boot.ini is dead... if you dual boot XP and Vista this file does nothing.

I haven't spent much time trying to figure it out, but Vista is using something else... perhaps its in the MBR now.

So... like... greetings from XP again

I really liked the AeroGlass interface and didn't begrudge it sucking up >10% of my 1.6GHz CPU, although I could live without the new Start menu. A surprising number of XP utilities and drivers worked OK as long as you set "Compatibility with XPSP2" properties on the installer and sometimes the installed app.

Having fast, reliable hibernation was nice, but one of the ways it hibernates fast is by not bothering to ask the device drivers "so, like, are you able to hibernate or will you be dead when I come back ?". As a result, I didn't figure out that my modem driver couldn't hibernate for a while.

Performance was OK on a 512MB system as long as I didn't load sound card drivers and didn't try to do too much at once. The killer for me, though, was the fact that I couldn't get a working VPN client to run under Vista -- I think Nortel is waiting to see if Microsoft actually ships it before doing any work on the VPN client ;(