Windows Vista Lounge

I had some problems on my second install with sound cards and USB wireless issues, but it’s all figured out now. Oddly, I got suckered in to updating my bios as a possible cure to some of the sound card issues–as it’s an embedded card on the motherboard. Well, one stray mouse click and the next time I rebooted, poof…nothing! Black screen, not bios prompts-nada! 

I did a quick forum search and found so many people saying the same thing…if you flash your bios and it gets hosed, you’re screwed! You need to replace the bios, replace the motherboard, on and on. Well, I wasn’t too thrilled about the idea so I pulled the battery, fired up the pc and it reset. Sweet, no bios replacements. 

I failed to reset the date afterward though, which I thought–no big deal. Well, Vista needs an accurate date or you can’t get any updates or extras to load. I came across this through another forum but thought I would share that in case others had the same issue. You also can’t register your product online without an accurate date, so this simple step of setting your date in bios can save you a lot of hassle, later. 

 Once I got through all that, I was able to install the sound card software (RealTek) and then the drivers for the USB wireless stick. The software loaded but it didn’t detect the stick, so I manually pointed the driver update to the installed software directly and it picked it up. Sweet! 

It’s a bit slow on 512MB of ram so I will have to upgrade to 1 or 2 GB before I can tell how well this will run on an Emachine T3304. My other installation, a Viewsonic M2000 is running well except the media center piece drags a bit when rendering album art. 

I’ll be trying some other experiments on the Viewsonic later this week

My first experience with the new release went extremely well. I bought a media center PC off of ebay, Viewsonic M2000 and loaded it up with the new Vista. It was a lengthy install but once done…wow! Amazing graphics and smooth interface. I had to add some RAM to the PC as it only had 256 on board at first (now 1 gig). But other than that, it worked perfect, sound, video, network, everything detected and I now have a nice small media center plugged right in to my big screen TV.

The next test was on an e-machine, T3304. Install was fine but sound didn’t detect and the wireless USB card isn’t having much of a go. I am using a WG111v2 from netgear. There are no drivers for vista, so I’m gonna have to find something else. I located the driver files for the soundcard on the RealTek.com website, they even had a vista driver!

So, I can’t really update the second install until I get some wireless going, or end up pluging it in to the router directly with a cable.

I’m real impressed with Vista RC1, and the media center piece is really exciting. The visual quality is something that’s been long over due.