Windows Vista ‘Final’ RTM – is it really Vista RC3?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 03 December 2006 00:19

Your IT - Entertainment

So far, it’s been a godsend. In use for twenty four hours, a lot of the little niggly things in RC1 are gone. Hibernation and sleep modes work properly. Websites that once triggered a jump into ‘Windows Vista Basic’ mode don’t seem to be doing it any more. The random crashes with Internet Explorer 7 that’d I’d get if I had too many tabs open seem to have gone as well.

My soundcard is back with sound coming from the speakers again, but the 3.5mm headphone jack still isn’t working, and neither is the internal microphone – I need to use a Logitech USB headset to get ‘a full soundcard’ with recording capabilities and sound directly to my ears.

The proper Windows Vista sounds are finally loaded, although anyone expecting a Robert Fripp soundtrack to be playing will be surprised to discover that the sounds are mostly the same sounds we’ve heard for a decade, only ‘Vista-fied’ to sound softer, smoother and calmer.

Perhaps there’ll be some more Robert Fripp action in the true ‘Ultimate’ version of Vista for those who are hanging out. But exactly why they needed Robert Fripp to make these sounds is unclear – maybe it was just cool to say that he was part of the audio team for Vista.

I did suffer one crash, where the system informed me it had restarted after I came back to the computer after an extended period of time, but it hasn’t happened again -yet . I’m thinking it might have been something to do with the sleep mode, but I’ll have to check this again, and I turned off any sleep/hibernate modes while the computer is on and plugged into mains power.

Vista, on my 2Gb, dual core equipped Tablet PC, runs very smoothly. Heck, RC1 ran very smoothly, but the RTM version is, as you’d expect, a lot better.

The inbuilt search seems to be faster too. I didn’t put a stopwatch on it but the search feature seems improved, and for me, that’s an excellent thing, especially as I use it extensively.

But I still have two drivers with yellow exclamation marks in the device manager which Windows Update hasn’t yet fixed – I think these are what is preventing my internal soundcard from working properly.

With Vista RTM, I was finally able to get a Telstra Next-G (HSDPA) PCMCIA card working successfully. What I’m not so happy about is the fact that it, like other PCMCIA cards out there, really seems to heat up the palm rest on a notebook computer quite a lot. After a while, even though you won’t get burned, it’s still quite annoying.

So what should one do then? Read on for more...