Well, I sent for a couple of copies of Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate edition (full version and an upgrade). Finally have a machine configured to begin some testing.
The first thing attempted was to create a fresh Windows 2000 Pro installation as to launch the Vista upgrade from within. It quickly told me that upgrading from this operating system was not supported and that one must boot from the Vista DVD to do a clean installation.
My second stab at it was more successful and was surprised by how relatively quickly it got installed considering the large amount of disk space it consumed.
Once running the Vista OS, I learned that my system had a 2.8 score (this is the lowest score of all the different metrics it uses do measure the total performance of the host computer). Even though the machine in question was equipped with an AGP nVidia 6800 sporting 512 MB it scored 2.8 on desktop graphics and that seems to be insufficient to run Aero.
The computer has an AMD Athlon 64 2800+ so I first chose to install the 64 bit version of Vista. The first application I tried to install was .NET Framework 1.1 redistributable, since it comes preloaded with the .NET Framework 2.0 redistributable. It gave me quite a bit of warnings and pointed me to some downloadable patches. I then installed my Cygwin vintage Mar 2004, which went through the setup routine without a hitch but ultimately did not work (bash.exe errors left and right).
I installed OpenOffice 2.1, FireFox 2.x, Thunderbird 1.5, and Gvim 7.x. All these applications worked well enough except that the Context menus (shell extensions) that permit me to send to edit in Vim any one selected file I right mouse click while on Windows Explorer were nowhere to be found.
I then thought about dumping the 64 bit version and also do a full installation of Windows XP SP2 follow by an upgrade to Vista 32 bit. I did that, but not before installing .NET Framework 1.1 and Cygwin while still in Win XP.
A few hours later, I had a Windows Vista running again but Cygwin was still broken.
I want to close this entry by expressing a very personal opinion:
No Cygwin? Ouch. That's definitely a non-starter for me. Having said that, I suspect Cygwin does some deep and nasty things to support e.g. fork().
Aero won't work with 6800? My old 6800GT runs Oblivion, probably the most demanding video game currently, just fine. Makes you wonder if the testing is accurate.
Good thing I got an 8800GTX in my current machine :)
Posted by: Barry Kelly at February 7, 2007 05:55 PMStrange that your graphics card won't run Aero. I have an ATI radeon xpress 200m, with a score of 2.5, and it runs just fine.
Posted by: Sam Williamson at February 7, 2007 06:02 PMAero runs fine on my Acer C310 tablet, which has a GeForce Go 6600. I had to boost the RAM though.
Re Cygwin: Looks like people have met with some success
http://blogs.vislab.usyd.edu.au/index.php/EnochLau/2007/02/05/cygwin_on_vista
http://nevali.wordpress.com/
Ha ha ha! Paco, I like your recommendations. Although I have to disagree on the usefulness of even XP and 2000. I wouldn't touch them with a 100 foot pole, except for the games. Is Windows good for anything else? :-)
Posted by: PJ Cabrera at February 9, 2007 02:24 AMOh, by the way. As per my previous comment, you can assume that they only reason I will ever upgrade to Vista, is once Windows games start coming out only for Vista. I really have no other use for Microsoft crap.
Posted by: PJ Cabrera at February 9, 2007 02:32 AM