Yesterday I managed to install Vista CTP build 5308 on my new Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi. This is what my BlogJet window looks like now:

blogjetwindow1_small1.jpg

In part it’s supposed to look like that, because the Glass effects of the new UI actually work pretty well on my system. In other parts it’s not as intended, for example where the menu bar is simply missing :-) The installation itself was easy and without problems. Kudos to Microsoft — I’m sure the installation is a lot easier than it used to be, and this was always a problem with some groups of potential users. It takes pretty long and the only status information is a thin progress bar that slowly moves across the whole screen… some work to be done here, I guess.

Stability is great where the system as a whole is concerned, and I haven’t seen a single crash of any kind so far. I see a few drawing problems and also compatibility issues, similar to those in BlogJet above, but I guess the drawing issues may be due to the fact that my display driver is still for the previous CTP build. It also shows problems when putting the system to sleep or hibernating, as it never wakes up correctly. I hope ATI is going to have updated drivers available soon.

Other stability problems I have seen include the fact that some modules suddenly stopped working by now, after working just fine initially. The nice Alt-Tab task switcher is one example of that. Internet Explorer 7 never worked quite right to begin with, it looked like it didn’t load any CSS files at all. I can’t find out now, because it’s stopped working altogether since then. Oh well… But who needs Alt-Tab switching if you can do Windows-Tab switching:

taskswitch_small.jpg

The new UI is really fantastic and I’m looking forward to doing some work with it in my own apps. So installing VS and the Vista version of the WinFX CTP will be the next thing.