I’ve just installed Vista RC1 on my main desktop machine, and for the first time it’s speedy enough and almost ready to be my main operating system. I’m typing this in Vista IE7 now.
Vista has had a bit of a troubled history for me. I have an Athlon-64 3500+ homebuild machine, with 1GB RAM, a SoundBlaster Live! Platinum 5.1 I paid quite a bit of money for a few years ago, and an NVIDIA 6800GT graphics card – something which should be fast enough for anything much thrown at it (it’s certainly fast enough for Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 at my LCD monitor’s resolution with anti-aliasing on.) Yet previous Vista builds have been horrendously slow, swapping to disc or just unusable.
Much of this seems to have been the fault of two companies: NVIDIA and Creative Labs. NVIDIA have fixed their problems and now their graphics drivers are quick, stable and very much up to the task. Creative have not, and it’s entirely their fault – they have decided not to write any Vista drivers at all for the Soundblaster Live! series, including the 5.1 Platinum I own, in an obvious attempt to make us all buy Audigys and X-Fis (too bad their Audigy and X-Fi Vista drivers don’t work properly, if at all, according to everyone who’s tried them). Microsoft themselves have tried to cajole Creative into writing the needed drivers, with no effect. The end result is that I had to use the kludge that is the kX drivers, and they don’t work too well on Vista.
No more. Now I’ve replaced my long-cable hi-fi link with Xbox Media Center, I no longer need to have two front outputs – one in the rear to my hi-fi, one in the front for my headphones. Now I can plug my headphones directly into the rear, and use XBMC to play music through the hi-fi in the next room. And because I can do that, I can use my NForce4 on-board audio, of which NVIDIA’s RC1 drivers work (if a little minor-buggily).
So when I was swapping a TV tuner today, I yanked out my Live 5.1; the last act in a long struggle, the very final straw for me being the fact that Creative despite all the complaining have refused to change their position (whilst their Audigy and X-Fi drivers still don’t work properly for everyone). So, goodbye Creative; I’ve bought a lot of your stuff over the years, but you’ll never see a penny of my money again. Good riddance to you all.
F L I C K E R I N G / F R A M E 
Hmm…Everyone else is having trouble streaming through XBMC from Vista; I can’t do it.
How did you do it?
I… um… haven’t done it. The XBMC streaming was the reason for binning the Live, but I didn’t count on that not working on Vista due to the sharing difficulties.
You can do UPnP streaming (depending on how lucky you are) through Media Player 11, which at least helps a little, but it looks like those who’re dissatisfied with this will have to wait until the samba team (it’s a samba issue) realise they need to fix it and the xbmc team update it to match. Until then, I dual-boot XP.
Anyway, I think you’ll find that if you upgrade to XBMC 01.01.2007 T3CH (you can download it off thepiratebay), SMB sharing with Vista is now working. Certainly is for me.
Happy New Year!