Creative Drivers, Vista, and God

Thus far, the Creative Labs Vista Audigy drivers have been pretty crap. I frequently get bursts of static over any audio, and only a reboot of my Media Center will fix it. But they’re betas: I can cut them some slack.

Yesterday, up popped a nice dialog box stating that my drivers would expire tomorrow, and that I could uninstall them. I didn’t see the popup until today, because it popped up behind Media Center. How handy.

Faced with a choice of a) downloading a new set of drivers, or b) running my Media Center without sound, I opted for option A.

Or, I’d like to opt for option A. Creative’s US support site is currently telling me that it “Can’t locate any sites with current domain/port credentials”, and the European support site can’t be found. It would appear that “dev1-eusite.cle.creaf.com.creative.com/support/downloads” isn’t online.

Interestingly, if I pick “Vatican City” as my location, I can work my way through a set of Italian pages and locate a new driver. Hopefully it’ll be in English.

I can’t help but imagine the Pope, tutting infallibly to himself as his Media Center pops up a message about the expiration of his sound drivers, but content in the knowledge that, it’s ok, he can download a new set of drivers from Creative. It really is all about who you know, isn’t it?

Fingers crossed: hopefully these drivers will be in English, fix my static problem, and make the Pope a very happy man.

Vista RTM is fine on the Mac Mini

I’m pleased to say the RTM release of Vista installs and runs without any problem on the Mac Mini. Glass was enabled on first boot, my network connection was up and running immediately, and the system itself seems to be very snappy. I can’t comment on sound or Media Center performance yet - I only finished installing at about 1am - but I’ll try that later.

For the curious, here’s the Windows Experience Index stats:

• Processor: 4.6 (Dual Core 1.66)
• Ram: 4.5 (1gb)
• Graphics: 3.4 (Intel integrated)
• Gaming: 3
• HDD: 4.4 (stock hard drive)

So a WEI of 3 thanks to the gaming performance, but very reasonable scores for everything else.

Interestingly, in order to fix a Bootcamp problem I had to reinstall OS X. Performing back to back installations of OS X, followed by Vista was an interesting experience. Vista certainly seems to install in a shorter amount of time than OS X.

There’s more to come on both Vista on the Mac Mini, and the future of my little Apple machine.

Vista RC2 + Mac Mini = Failure!

As reported by TUAW here, Vista RC2 doesn’t work on the Mac Minis. Or at least, it doesn’t work on mine. I’ve heard reports of some Mini users getting the install to work with no problems. On my machine, the Vista installation routine doesn’t like the smell of the partition that Bootcamp creates, and refuses to install.

This is a shame - I thought Microsoft were actively supporting the Mini, and other Apple machines. This struck me as a Smart Move. Shame they’ve broken things in this release. Unless, of course, it’s a Bootcamp, or firmware problem…

I’ll have to continue to see if I can find a workaround. Or wait for the RTM release - not that there’s any certainty that this release will fair any better.

Mac Mini + Vista Success

I’d heard that the Pre RC1 release of Vista (build 5536) ran happily on Intel Macs so, having been looking for an excuse to try Boot Camp, I gave it a go.

I had two issues. The first involved the firmware on my Mini. Even though Software Update displayed no additional updates, Boot Camp insisted that I was out of date. Every time I ran Boot Camp Assistant, it displayed an error message about the firmware version I was running.

A quick browse around the forums presented this. One brief download later, and Boot Camp was running happily.

I’m impressed with Boot Camp. It’s incredibly easy to repartition your drive, and initiate a Windows installation - simply drag the slider to the size you want, and click “install Windows”.

I happily watched my machine reboot, launch the Vista setup, and start installing. Foolishly assuming that everything was going well, I left the Mini merrily chugging along, and busied myself with other things.

When I returned to the machine, the monitor was in power saving mode and nothing I did would wake it up. I rebooted, and the same thing happened - white startup screen for a few seconds, then into power saving mode. I tried to boot from the CD again, but the same thing happened.

I booted back in OS X, and tried to kick off another install from the CD. I got the same blank screen again. So I removed Boot Camp, and tried the whole process from scratch. Same result.

Finally, because I’ve known it cause problems before, I powered off my LaCie external firewire drive and tried again. Sure enough, the Vista installation DVD booted and ran. This time - and I know this breaks the golden “watched pot” rule of Windows installations - I kept my beady eye on the installation process.

This time everything worked fine. I hadn’t burned myself a Boot Camp driver cd, but Vista already included the network driver, and managed to locate the video driver using Windows Update. Impressive.

So at this stage I’ve got a fully functional Vista machine, on the Mini, without the need to jump through lots of complicated hoops. Even the Media Center side of things works. Well done, Microsoft. If they’re going to try to tempt Apple users away from OS X - and there’s a very real possibility of that with Intel based machines - then it’s in Microsoft’s interest to make the process as painless as possible. And I’m pleased to say: Right now, it pretty much is.