We signed off on Vista

The speech team finally signed off on Vista, which means after exhaustive testing we don't know of any issues that stand in the way of our users productively using speech. Of course, we're one of many teams, so this doesn't mean Vista is ready to ship (yet) but we're extremely close.  I'm running the latest bits on my Toshiba Tablet M200 and it sings: it's amazing what kind of things you can still do even on a relatively old (2 1/2 yr old) laptop.  Besides speech recognition (of course) I have the new graphic drivers and the wonderful aero interface.

I was almost going to say "we're done with Vista" and then I caught myself because of course we're not really done. We're already working on lots of other cool ideas that we can't wait to show you.

Published 04 November 06 08:56 by sprague

Comments

# Cheryl D Wise said on November 5, 2006 10:35 AM:

Congratulations !

Please till me that on your m200 with the drivers you are using you can sleep. hibernate and have the video wake back up as well.

I'm running RC 2 full time on my m200 and the only major issue I have is the video driver. Trying speech recognition with Word 2007 and Vista is on my "todo') list.

# sprague said on November 5, 2006 8:45 PM:

Yes, as a matter of fact my M200 drivers do sleep properly, and I can rotate the screen and run video.  But it took a while to get here -- the pre-release drivers (including on RC2) were still pretty twitchy.  I'm sure the ones that are released for production will be just fine.

# M. Rajesh said on November 6, 2006 2:46 AM:

Hi Sprague,

This is very good and definitely Speech is going to rock on Windows Vista. But I have been facing this issue about the non availability of drivers for Realtek AC'97. When using this driver I get the message that Speech Recognition Engine could not be started.

So is there any news about the availability of updated drivers for Realtek so that speech will work on windows Vista RC2.

# Joe said on November 6, 2006 10:09 AM:

Aero on a m200?  is that including glass?  I have a m205, which only has 32MB of video RAM - so no chance of Aero Glass.

# sprague said on November 6, 2006 10:23 AM:

I don't have any information about Vista drivers, so I don't know about the Realtek situation other than I am able to use Vista speech just fine on my desktop with Realtek.

I think one reason I'm able to run Glass/Aero on my M200 is that they do something with sharing regular RAM with Video.  I have 1GB of regular RAM.

# Cheryl D Wise said on November 6, 2006 11:12 AM:

Like Richard I've had Aero Glass running on my m200 with only 32mb dedicated ram but I have 2 gig of sysem ram. I've had better mre stable video with Aero Glass than Windows Basic.  I've been moving back and forth between the two since I need Windows Basic for screenshots for tutorials and a book. I really need to try out the speech recongition since I've got carpel tunnel and too much typing, well hurts.

# Jeff said on November 17, 2006 2:26 AM:

What about the screen rotation and other tablet buttons?  

# Kenneth Roberts said on November 18, 2006 11:13 PM:

Do you have special drivers for your M200? I can't get sleep to work properly with the latest bios / NVIDIA drivers.

# sprague said on November 21, 2006 12:22 PM:

Jeff, yes screen rotation and other tablet buttons work fine for me.

Kenneth, I am using the drivers that come with the internal Microsoft build.  I'm not a driver expert, so I'm not sure where you go to get the latest (or if they're publicly available yet).  I assume you tried the Toshiba web site?  

One thing: I heard there have been some problems with the fan on some of these pre-release drivers, where the motherboard can overheat and cause hardware damage (because of a software bug!)  Obviously Toshiba doesn't want those to get out in the wild until they've solved the problem.  I haven't had any trouble with mine, but you may want to wait till the official ones are ready before you install.

# Joe Case said on November 24, 2006 1:29 AM:

How about media center?  does that work on your m200?  I get nothing but a black screen when I launch it...

# sprague said on November 27, 2006 10:54 AM:

Yup, I can run Media Center on my M200.

# Kenneth Roberts said on November 27, 2006 12:56 PM:

Thanks for the info, Richard. There are many Toshiba M200 users eagerly waiting to get Vista working properly. If you get any info on when the drivers for the M200 will be released it would be greatly appreciated...

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