Windows Vista and Office 2007 Beta
I am blogging this from Word 2007 New blog entry. I downloaded and installed Vista on my Dell E510 Media Center. The version of Vista is Ultimate and it works great. I did run into a couple of things and so I thought I would let people know about them.
My configuration of the E510 is 2 GB RAM and 256 ATI X600 Raedon video, with Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS. When I installed Vista, it recognized almost everything. It saw my video and installed a video driver, and also saw my dual tuner and installed the Angel II MPEG controller, but choked on my Sound Blaster Audigy card.
I did decide to go out to ATI and download their latest driver, and I was pleasantly surprised to see they had Vista drivers and they are brand new (5/26/2006). I downloaded and installed them just for good measure.
I went to Sound Blaster and they had Vista drivers, but they were for a previous build (5231 was the requirement). I downloaded them and proceeded to install them. Well the install choked so I had to reboot my machine, and from thereafter, the install would complain about the version of the OS.
I decided to go brute force since Vista did not want to let the Audio go, and since I could not play with the Media Center part of it until I had audio (it must be a feature that says that if there is no audio, then it really isn’t Media Center), this is what I did. I downloaded Winzip 10.0 and opened the Self Extractor exe of the Vista drivers for Sound Blaster, and extracted them to a folder. No sooner had I done that, and Vista found the driver in that directory and installed it successfully. I was off to the races, and Media Center worked.
I thought, well since I am going Beta, I might as well download Office 2007 Beta since I had heard that it had some features that were pretty cool. I cannot believe how much fun it is to use it now. In fact I am not looking forward to going back to Office 2003 on my tablet. If I did not need to use Send Personally to send mail, I would jump at it. It is fantastic. So the combination of Office 2007 and Windows Vista ROCK. I have had only 1 crash and after that it was pretty smooth sailing.
Well more on this later, and BTW: I will be at TechEd 2006 in Boston for those that are going. I will be hanging in the Community Lounge areas. Look me up.
