Vista

So Boot Camp 2.1 came out yesterday.  This release has official Vista x64 support but the trackpad issues (no two finger right click, erratic two finger scrolling) have not been fixed.  This is starting to smell bad and it has Steve Jobs’ name all over it.

I ran Windows Server 2003 as my desktop from the time it came out until Vista shipped and now I’m on Windows Server 2008.  And boy does it rock!

I won’t repeat the many blog posts that are out there that go over the steps needed to get Win2k8 running just like Vista (though I will refer you to my last blog post about getting sidebar working right).  What I will tell you is that almost everything runs under Win2k8 with less RAM than under Vista.  People will tell you all day that there is no difference between the Vista SP1 and Win2k8 binaries but there is a difference somewhere.

Actually I checked the ntoskrnl.exe binary from both Vista SP1 and Win2k8 and they are truly exactly the same.  However, that doesn’t mean they run the same.  The Vista kernel could have all sorts of compatibility shims that get loaded dynamically or checked at runtime.  One piece of evidence that Win2k8 is different is the fact that a few programs don’t function correctly.  The latest version of skype and microTorrent do not function (you can use an older version of Skype though).

What I know is that it *feels* tons faster.  IE just appears instantly.  Explorer windows open immediately.  And the RAM usage just speaks for itself.  The table below shows what the memory usage typically is on my system for

I’ve been running with Windows Server 2008 as my primary desktop OS now for a few weeks and one of the things that I had not got to work was Sidebar.  I found several blog posts on the net where people claim to have it working but following their steps always resulted in failure.

More specifically running sidebar would show the icon in the system tray but the app would immediately exit.  Turns out that I needed on extra step.  So, without further delay, here are the steps I did to get sidebar working in Windows Server 2008 x64.

1. Copy the Windows Sidebar folder from c:\Program Files on a Vista x64 SP1 installation to your Win2k8 install.
2. From an administrator console run:
   regsvr32 sbdrop.dll
   regsvr32 wlsrvc.dll
3. From that same console run:
   sidebar /RegServer
4. Move the Sidebar registry information from a working Vista SP1 x64 install.  You can find it at HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/SideBar.
5. Run sidebar!

Here’s a screenie showing it working on my setup.

Vista is better than XP.  Maybe.  Yes, I guess it is.  In most ways.  Except why can’t I plaster a 2560×1024 image across both my monitors?  It keeps wanting to… well.. I don’t know what it’s doing except I know it’s wrong.

Enter DisplayFusion.  A terrific little app that fixes this and adds several other nifty little features.  And, best of all, it’s free.  Good job, guys!

I installed SP1 RC1 the first day it was available.  Almost immediately my Vista box would hang overnight.  It would seem to work great during the day but at night simply would not come out of sleep mode.  So I uninstalled it.

This past weekend I had a few extra minutes (or was it hours?) so I paved the box and reinstalled Vista x64 deciding this time to not install any third party drivers that I didn’t absolutely have to have.  Turns out the only one I needed was for my Realtek audio chipset. 

I reapplied SP1 RC1 and after 3 days no hangs.  Everything seems rock solid.  Well, it is an RC and Microsoft has an amazingly hard job getting all the different flavors of machines out there to play nice with Vista.  All in all they do a fairly good job.  SP1 RC1 stable for me.. so far.