Toshiba M400 with Windows Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2
I have finally got Vista Beta 2 running on my M400. It seems really stable. I do miss the weather gadget that was present in previous builds.
All of the hardware buttons do not work out of the box. However you can use the Intel driver to rotate the screen.
Alas, no Aero glass. It seems that Intel has really messed this one up. (I am kinda wishing that Toshiba continued with the Nvidia) On the Intel site they say that they are Vista ready and there are a number of people who seem to have gotten glass to work. But unfortunately I am not one of them. If someone cares to give me some tips I would appreciate it.
Well lets see, I have a whole lot of beta stuff going on here. Vista Beta, Office Beta, Virtual Server R2 SP1 beta, Office SharePoint Beta...
For the most part Vista is very nice. Compatibility seems good except for all those system utilities, and driver support is just not there yet.
Office 2007 is amazing. The beta is significantly more stable and much more polished.
I do have an issue with some of the defaults in the ribbon, one example is that when you open a previously sent email, the option to resend the message shouldn't be buried. It seems that all the crashing in Outlook with the preview pane on when viewing a html message has gone away.
One other thing I have an issue with is the RSS feeds. It seems that the configuration for this is burried in the Send Receive menu item. Also, you don't have the ability to modify the RSS feed url from Outlook. You can only enable and disable. I haven't spent the time, but I think there is an xml file that controls the feeds somewhere in your profile.
There is another annoyance that I hope it has been fixed, and that has to do with OneNote auto-repair functionality. It seems in Beta-1 TR I had a file that I was using to take notes for the entire day go corrupt. Although I could see all the data, OneNote notified me that I should click on the message for me to repair the file. Let me just sum it up, DONOT click on this message w/o backing up the .one file that you are working on. It seems that OneNote decided to DELETE my notes for the entire day. It really pissed me off, but I realize that I am using Beta product so I have no one to blame but myself...=).
The other thing I hope is fixed in OneNote, it the auto import feature from my WM5 phone. In Beta-1 TR it would hang OneNote after syncing.
I do have one warning with Vista. It seems that if you get into a high disk activity mode, as with Virtual Machines, and suspend or hibernate without first pausing the VM, you will be prone to the blue screen of death.
When I am done configuring SharePoint I will post some more =)