Vista, Continued

Happy Monday Everyone! Up to over 1,200 hits so far!

To get right to business, my ongoing testing of Microsoft’s new version of Windows, Windows Vista, seems to be going pretty good. There have been a few problems. Most notibly, my USB Bluetooth adapter, my Motorola Phone, and my webcam.

Here we go:
USB Bluetooth Dongle: While I got the MSI drivers for it, they were for XP SP2 only. THat didn’t stop me though, I installed it anyways, the only problem is, I cannot access OBEX support on my phone, only DUN. As I’m trying to transfer stuff off my phone, and put some music on, this is very limiting. As I have a motorola phone cable, I tried that next…
Motorola E815: Not supported on the stock vista, I had to grab drivers. Booo, when I installed the drivers, Vista only recognized it as a USB modem. That’s no good. I tried then installing Motorola Phone Tools, which brings me to the next…
Motorola Phone Tools Did not properly work. The best I could get out of it is “Initializing…”. Vista said it wsan’t working properly, and it would apply some compatiblity settings to the next execution. I tried it again, but got no further. Bahh humbug.
Toshiba Function Keys/Media Keys: Looks like I can’t use my functions keys on my Toshiba Satellite A100 SK9. That’s no fun, I can’t have single touch access to screen locking, sleep, and hibernate. Also, I can’t press a single button to load a browser, play/pause, stop, next/prev media keys either.
Built in Monitor My Toshiba’s monitor doesn’t seem to be able to dim. While this sounds trivial, I go mobile a lot. Not being able to dim reduces my battery significantly. The normal dim controls are function keys, but I just don’t think Vista recognizes it for what it is.
nVidia Control Panel: This is severly limited. All of the normal functions are just not there, like advanced timing. I’m really dissipointed in this.
Logitech Messenger Webcam: According to the Logitech website, my webcam isn’t Vista compatible. That’s about as far as I’ll take it, because I don’t even use it a great deal. It’s a pain that I can’t use it, but I’ll live.

Other than that, most things work really good. There are some known program incompatilities with Visual Studio, mainly that I have to run it in administrator mode. That isn’t so bad, I needed to do that in XP as well for debugging access.

Motorola Phone Solution: Use a transflash memory card. I left my transflash-SD card adapter home, so I’ll either have to go home to get it, or buy another one.

Thanks for tuning in!