We finally got Vista up and running last week. I had a play with Vista way back at PDC '05, but wanted to wait for at least an RC build (Release Candidate) before bothering to muck about and get it running. The Vista build I installed was "pre-RC1". These guys certainly have imagination ;)
Anyway, installing it went find after convincing Vista that it could read the PATA 40GB HDD. It's weird, because the installer couldn't see it even after doing a Shift-F10 to a command prompt and then use DISKPART to partition it (the prompt could see the C: drive, but not the installer). I gave up at this point but Angus used the WindowsXP installer disk to re-format the drive and then Vista could see it.
It was during this process that I came across the single best new feature of Vista - you can now load 3rd party drivers during install using not just a floppy disk, but also CDs and USB drives! About bloody time too...
So, obviously the reason for installing Vista was to see if FinalBuilder runs OK. And I'm very happy to report it does, but with one small exception. FinalBuilder hosts the .NET CLR, and with Vista you get v3 of the CLR which for some reason doesn't yet work with FB (we're looking into it now, especially since the RC of .NET v3 is now available for download). Luckily all you need to do is tell FB to host the v2 of the CLR and it all works perfectly!
Here's a couple of screenshots:
