My VMware install is complete and running. As I hinted to in my previous article the video display on setup and first boot is terrible. After first boot I was able to find out it was running at 4–bit color. :-) No wonder it looked bad. Anyway… it’s the VMware video.
The install went without error. Vista b1 will install on VMware v5 build 13124. Now… it’s just no fun without decent video so in comes VMtools. This is where is goes down hill, a little. First off the VMtools video driver will install and works just fine although auto guest resizing when going from full screen to window doesn’t work. That’s Ok though… no one said it was supposed to work. We’re just trying it anyway. It’s good enough to use until VMware pushes a new build to us.
Drag and Drop from VM desktop to host machine doesn’t work. Host to guest just gives the NO cursor and guest to host almost make you smile then hits you with a “Cannot get attributes” or something like that. I could only make it error out once then subsequent tries just resulted in nothing happening.
Audio doesn’t work. The driver just won’t install. I haven’t banged around on it but I did try to force an install and only received an error about making sure my driver was for a 32–bit machine.
Audio does work but I had to download the Soundblaster PCI 128 driver from Creative directly. I was unable to get the driver packaged with VMtools to work. See my article above: Sound support with VMware v5 build 13124 without VMtools I provided the link in that article for the driver that works.
The network driver WILL install. I was unable to get it to install from the VMtools setup but I was able to install it from Device Manager and pointing it to the Program Files/VMware/VMware Tools/Drivers/vmxnet folder.
I can’t decide if USB passthrough works or not. I can get Vista to see my USB printer but it doesn’t like the drivers but it won’t even bark at my SanDisk Jump Drive. Perhaps a setting? Perhaps it just doesn’t work.
That’s my initial observations. It installs with a few hickups but nothing major. I imagine VMware will have a new build out that support B1 in the very near future. Tomorrow at the office I’ll see if VPC does any better. :-)
I’ll leave you with a couple of IE7 shots. The first is of the RSS toolbar option and the second is what it does with the feed. Click for the full image. It’s pretty neat. I don’t think it will replace a desktop aggregator but it’s still cool. It’s not like the Firefox way of doing it, which I personally like. IE displays a special page with the feed on it. It may be configurable however to display the feed like Firefox does, in a cascading menu. These are just initial observations here people. Have fun with Beta 1.
If you don't get your question answered here or are having a specific problem please feel free to browse this site further or check out the Windows Vista Beta 1 forum courtesy of the South Central Indiana .NET Users Group.
