October 9th, 2006
Vista RC2 x64 'Ultimate' progress report
This weekend I had a chance to install and review Windows Vista RC2 x64 Ultimate edition (x64 is the 64 bit extensions for 32 bit x86 computers based on modern AMD or Intel CPUs) on my main desktop computer. I had the urge to be brave and try the 64 bit edition of Vista even though driver support is probably weaker than on the 32 bit edition of Vista. There were many nice things to like about Vista RC2 and it's close enough to see the finish line, but a few minor bugs remain and a flakey sound card driver put the system in to a hard lockup.
To start the review, I'll start off by listing the hardware specifications which is a moderately fast computer with relatively inexpensive components from a year ago. The system cost me about $700 (not including monitor) a year ago and received a Vista performance index between 4.3 and 5.5 which should put to rest any doubt that Vista will very run well on a cheap modern PC since it is possible to purchase a better computer for less money today.
- Intel Pentium 4 model 630 (with EM64T)
- ECS RS400-A motherboard
- On board 10/100 LAN
- On board Realtek AC'97 sound card
- ATI X800 256-MB PCI-Express graphics
- 1 GB DDR2 400 MHz (2 x 512 MB dual channel)
- SATA 160 GB hard drive (used for the Vista test)
- Sound Blaster Live 24 5.1 audio
- Polycom C100S USB speakerphone
- Razer USB gaming mouse
- Dell 20.1" 1680×1050 LCD
The "Ultimate" edition of Vista is the superset of the premium home and enterprise business editions of Windows Vista and contains every single function in Vista. I chose this version of Vista so I could test all the major features of Windows Vista. Installation of Vista RC2 was much faster than previous Vista versions and took a total of 40 minutes to install. There were some scary moments where you got no messages on the screen and almost no activity from the computer which made me a little concerned, but it finished without a glitch and it even installed every single WDM certified driver out of the box except for the Sound Blaster Live 24 (and we'll find out why it was excluded for good reason).
Even the screen resolution was automatically configured correctly the first time the system came up. Since Microphones and speakers weren't detected on the Realtek (I didn't know the hardware could report this kind information to the system) and the Polycom USB speakerphone was the only speaker/Mic detected, sound was automatically routed to the USB speakerphone. The network was automatically detected and Vista prompted me for my physical location and I told it I was home which probably configured the firewall a little more lax than if I had told it I was in a public network. Once I was up and running, I proceeded to check out the basics like customizing the sidebar and trying the 32 and 64 bit editions of Internet Explorer 7
Note on x64 Operating Systems
X64 platforms will run both 32 and 64 bit software at full speed but x64 systems will only work with 64 bit drivers. Applications can either be 32 or 64 bit but device drivers MUST be 64 bit and they must be digitally signed by the vendor in order for them to be accepted by Vista x64.
The Calendar sidebar was nice though I wonder if it's tied to the Microsoft Outlook calendar. The notepad sidebar is definitely something I will use since I'm always looking for something to write on or type on though I'm wondering how to back up its data. The RSS feeds sidebar was also a welcome feature and it is directly integrated to IE7's RSS reader. The CPU and Memory meter sidebar looks slick but I would love to have something that shows network up/down throughput activity and hard drive I/O statistics. I/O activity is probably the most important metric because a rattling hard disk drive plays a huge role in system sluggishness. Overall the sidebar seems to be something I will start using regularly especially when I'm on a widescreen display that has 1680 pixels wide to spare.
The system was for the most part very responsive and I was hoping to make the system even more responsive by sticking in a fast 2 GB Compact Flash card. Unfortunately my USB 2.0 interface on my motherboard isn't the greatest hardware in my experience and it failed the requirements to run ReadyBoost. A lot of my older systems failed too and Microsoft might help users out by giving some hardware guidance for ReadyBoost compatible hardware. There were times further along in my testing that the hard drive was cranking like crazy and I would have loved to have a ReadyBoost working.
Internet Explorer 7 (32 or 64 bit) seemed solid and the User Interface is a welcome change. Running IE7 under reduced user privileges under Vista Protected Mode makes me feel a lot better about zero-day security flaws. IE6 has had a couple of nasty zero-day flaws in recent months with two this month and one of them won't be patched until this coming Tuesday but IE7 has been immune for the most part even without Protected Mode threat mitigation. I did have an issue with the embedded Windows Media Player when it failed to stretch the video out to the wide aspect ratios which seems like a step backwards since I never had problems with this before in Windows XP. Take this video blog for example where I embedded 16×9 wide aspect video in to the webpage, IE7 failed to properly render the video in widescreen format and insisted on putting a black bar on the left and right of the video which caused the image to compress horizontally and render incorrectly. For those who have followed my blogs, they'll know that aspect ratio hell is one of my pet peeves and they definitely need to fix this for me to put my stamp of approval on Vista. This was not a problem in IE6, IE7 beta, Firefox, or Opera on Windows XP. <next page —>
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George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
