RTM, Vista, 2007 and Sony function buttons

The email finally arrived in my Inbox - Vista has RTM'd. Dutifully, I downloaded the RTM, some 2.49GB for the x86 English build. Obviously, so did every other MSDN subscriber as the speed was painful when you could get it to work at all but we got there in the end.

It took a while so I also downloaded the RTM of Office 2007 Professional as well. Since my shiny Sony Vaio was running Vista 5744 and Office 2007 TR they both needed sorting. Office came in at 410MB which isn't bad considering prior versions.

Eventually they arrived on my laptop. Vista upgrade from Vista 5744? Well, it LETS you, but I got an advisory about my bluetooth stack / software not being compatible with Vista. Hmm. Uninstall, run the Vista installer again...boy does that ever take a while. "May take a few hours". "You are not kidding". So Vista was there but with a generic video driver on a Vista capable (badged) and brand new Vaio.

Pointed the relevant bit of Vista at the drivers folder on the hard disk and the nVidia installed fine.

Install Office 2007 RTM. As Mark has already noticed, you can't install it over the Beta so I have to uninstall it. Fine. Eventually I got it happy enough and about 20% into the installer I had my first Vista BSOD which dutifully dumped everything to the hard disk. Rinse and repeat viewers - it happened again.

Note - the nVidia driver that ships with the Sony Vaio is fine with XP but causes BSODs with Vista. So I changed that to the Microsoft badged one and it has been fine ever since.

Then came my SIPGate client, Skype, Live Messenger, AVG anti virus, Acrobat Reader and Virtual Server 2005. Hmm, VS2005 doesn't work under Vista but apparently VS2007 Beta does. Great.

Then run the Aero check (Windows Experience Index). I was on 1.0 as it had not been done but now I'm at 4.2 which is held back by the disk transfer rate - my own fault for going for the 4200rpm disk instead of the 5400 version but I wanted 2GB of RAM, ah well.

By now I was getting a trifle bored but I fancied playing with the extra toys including playing a DVD on the lappy and outputting it to my projector over the VGA connector as an additional screen. You think that Fn F7 will send the image to the external screen? I think not Sir. You need the pigging software which isn't on the pigging CD because they don't ship one any more. Can I download it? Yup - after jumping through hoops it comes down at 12kb/sec and is 80MB. After the 5th go at downloading it, it all came down and was corrupt.

So I STILL don't have a way to go to external screen, I still can't adjust the brightness and if Fozzy says I should have bought an Acer Ferrari, I'll take his MVP rucksack and stick it somewhere fairly memorable. Actually, in the sober light of day, I may delegate that duty to someone else and now I'm feeling quite faint.

If you got this far please note you need to get out more.