RC1 vs

[Guest]

(I tried posting this about an hour ago, but I got some odd blank window that
just kept clicking, so hopefully this will be the only post.)

Hey, Everyone,

Closer and closer! I can't wait. To everyone working so hard to release
Vista, my thanks!

I have a couple questions, and I hesitate to ask them, either because I
won't like the honest answer or I'll get an "official" answer.

After reading about Office Beta 2 for a few days, most saying they were
using it as production, and some saying it was a disaster, I bit the bullet,
downloaded it, and installed it. I love it! A lot! And I'm using it on my one
and only production laptop. A few weeks in, I had a very weird problem or
two, and while troubleshooting, learned it wasn't a good idea to have Office
2003 on the same machine. I uninstalled it, endured a few more issues, and
just reinstalled the manufacture image, got rid of Office 2003, and
instealled 2007 Beta 2. No worries; it's Beta...that's what happens, but I'm
stable enough and "quick" enough, that I don't regret doing it. I love the
interface, vastly prefer it to XP/2003. Way to go, MS!

Now, I've downloaded RC1, and I'm currently downloading 5728 (31%). I've
read and reread Paul Thurrott's site (who definitely recommends upgrading to
B2TR for Office 2007, so I'll do this regardless). I've read other sites. I'm
tempted to go for it. To take the plunge and install RC1...or 5728. I have a
few questions.

1. Do you think one or the other build is stable enough? I'm definitely not
looking for any kind of a guaranty; no one could give it, and I don't want
one. I'm just looking for an honest assessment of the risk. Will I
occasionally crash? Sure. That's fine. I can live with that for a bit till
the final version comes out, and I'll happily send my reports and share my
comments with MS. Will it be impossible to read my emails and write in Word?
Will I be completely prevented from using my PC for ever and ever? Then,
maybe I should try and be a bit more patient.

2. My understanding is that this will be the very last build anyone in the
public can download, and in my naivete, I assume 5728 is more stable than
RC1. However, the page offering the link states that it was released without
the "same internal testing process as RC1." Does this mean it's likely to be
more unstable than RC1? Or, just not as widely tested, but generally more
stable?

3. I'm also concerned about the warning that this may not have the same
level of support or servicing (that might be OK--I'm not sure I'm able to get
support on 5600 anyway, am I?), and that we may not be able to upgrade to teh
final version of Windows Vista. I think I recall this same last warning on
Office 2007 and RC1. To be honest, I'm not sure I understand the warning. Are
they telling users not to expect a free upgrade? That only makes sense; I
can't wait to pay for my upgade to Ultimate! Sign me up now! Here's my card!
Or...do they mean that having this version on my PC will make it
impossible for some reason to install the upgrade once I have that shiny new
disc in hand? That's kind of scary. Ok, a lot scary.

4. If I can put a couple questions into this one so it's my "last," my
laptop maker (Gateway) provided a quasi-cool, quasi-lame XP OS disc. It's on
my laptop as a fake drive (logical drive?), so I have C: D: (my second hard
drive with all my data...ALL my data, even my .pst file), and E: (the logical
drive). When I first booted my machine the day I got it, I was prompted to
make backup discs. So I have them, and this logical drive. After the "Beta 2
Incident," I reinstalled the OS from the logical drive. Seemed pretty slick
actually, but I still have the discs. I launched the Vista upgrade just to
see that first screen, and it found my logical drive, E:. That seems good,
but my assumption is that if I install Vista, it will erase my E: drive
(unless I install Vista as an upgrade, but I'm not sure if that's the best
way to go????). That makes me a tiny bit nervous, but I can perhaps move the
files on E: to D:, and I do have the discs. And last, if for some reason,
after installing Vista, it doesn't work and I need to reinstall XP, can I do
it from the discs (or E: if that survives), or will having Vista on my C:
drive prevent the install of an earlier OS?

Just asking these questions might indicate that I shouldn't do this. I guess
that's fair, but I'm hoping the people on this list will understand why I'm
eager to start using Vista now. Again, I am not asking for ANY guaranties, I
know the risks are there and that even if 5728 (or RC1) had only one bug in
it, there would be risk. But I am very happy with Office 2007, and if the
risk of either of these builds is similar, than I'm game to start the
adventure!

My apologies for the length of this post, but I wanted to be as clear as
possible. I also hope I'm not the only person out there looking for the
answers to these questions. I would be happy to call someone and chat (my
dime) if that would be better, faster, or easier than typing a response.

Oh, I guess one more: Is there a decent, free utility for burning the .iso
image to my DVD (heck...does XP, or does XP only write to CD?)? While running
the Upgrade Advisor, it found NERO OEM on my hard drive, and even the reviews
warned that this had to go, and it went. Duh! I should have burned the image
first, but I jumped right into making the few tweaks needed for Vista.

My sincerest thanks for reading this, and any help you can provide. I hope
Patrick Schmid and some of the other amazing people on this site will be able
to respond.

Best regards,

Keith

 

[Doug]

You should be able to re-install Nero from your backup disk or E: but there
is a neat little free program
called ImgBurn that I have used to burn the last 3 builds of Vista including
5728 which I just burned and
installed a couple of hours ago. You stand a very good chance of losing
your XP and data so make sure you have backups.
I like it, except no sound so far. And finally XP will write to DVDs.

Doug

 

[Guest]

Doug,

Thanks! I'll download the utility since you've had success with it. And
thank you for the warning. All my data is backed up and on drive D:.

Perhaps you'd venture to discuss my other questions? ;-) Are you loving RC1
and 5278?

Or...a couple other questions occurred to me: Do I need to install RC1
before 5728, or is 5728 complete? And, though I asked this in my original
post, I think I was unclear. Is 5728 the last build before we can buy the
official release, or will RTM also be downloadable before we can buy the
official release?

Depending on the answers to my original post, I'll probably upgrade today or
tomorrow.

Thanks again!!

Keith

 

[Doug]

Although I did an upgrade I'm 99.9% sure that 5728 is complete. No one can
say if it's the
last build available. Even Colin B kept saying RC1 was the last public
build available. It all depends
on whether Microsoft decides to offer later builds to us. When it started
they said Beta 2 and RC1
but have added 5536 and 5728 so I think we'll get more. And yes I'm loving?
RC1 and 5728
Upgrade from RC1 to 5728 took about 2 hours.

Doug

 

[Guest]

DRAT! I downloaded 5728, as I said. Well, now after downloading ImgBurn, I
try to load 5728 and I get the following error:

Invalid or unsupport image file format!

I thought maybe there was something wrong with my download, so I deleted it
and downloaded it again. It took a LOT longer to download this time (over 2
hours), so I thought (hoped) that was a good sign. I tried to load the .iso
image again, and got the same error. If I try to load RC1, it loads without a
problem. It's just when I try to load 5728

The second download is 2,683,928 KB. Is that the wrong size? I forgot to
take note of the size of the first download.

Is there something obvious I just don't understand? I hope someone has the
answer!

Oh, and sorry to reply to myself, but for some reason, I can't reply to
Doug's last post. Sigh....

 

[Doug]

My downloaded 5728 iso and my burned 5728 disk both show 2,749,628,416
so I'm thinking you have corrupt download.

Doug

 

[Doug]

I noticed after my reply to you that others are having this problem too.
I use a download manager that seems to work well, don't know if it
would help but works for me. 2,749,628,416 bytes = 5728

http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/

Doug

 

[David Wilkinson]

DRAT! I downloaded 5728, as I said. Well, now after downloading ImgBurn, I
try to load 5728 and I get the following error:

Invalid or unsupport image file format!

I thought maybe there was something wrong with my download, so I deleted it
and downloaded it again. It took a LOT longer to download this time (over 2
hours), so I thought (hoped) that was a good sign. I tried to load the .iso
image again, and got the same error. If I try to load RC1, it loads without a
problem. It's just when I try to load 5728

Why do so many people try to burn and install without checking the MD5
or SHA1 hash? Makes no sense to me.

David Wilkinson

 

[Guest]

Then you'll be glad to know I've done neither. I download, then check the
size, and can immediately see something is wrong.

Once I get the size right, I'll check the other info too, though I'll have
to learn how first! Heh....

 

[David Wilkinson]

Then you'll be glad to know I've done neither. I download, then check the
size, and can immediately see something is wrong.

Once I get the size right, I'll check the other info too, though I'll have
to learn how first! Heh....

[snip]

Checking the size is not the same as checking the hash. The only sure
way is to check the hash. It's a waste of time (and everybody's server
bandwidth) to download again because you think the size may be wrong, or
because you got a bad burn.

I use the free program HashCalc from SlavaSoft to check the hash (I use
it on XP where I do my downloads, but it probably works on Vista too).

David Wilkinson

 

[Guest]

I see. Well, I'm certainly sorry. What I had read till this was to check the
download size. I tried HashCalc and verified the sizes were identical, even
though my file size is different from Doug's and others.

However, the first time I downloaded, the .iso file wouldn't even load into
ImgBurn, so I suspect that the first one must have been corrupt anyway. I
tried David's download manager and that must have done the trick, because
while the size was different, the Hash numbers were the same.

Thank you again for the advice and help. Hopefully, I'll now have a
successful install of Vista 5728.

Best to all,

Keith

Then you'll be glad to know I've done neither. I download, then check the
size, and can immediately see something is wrong.

Once I get the size right, I'll check the other info too, though I'll have
to learn how first! Heh....

[snip]

Checking the size is not the same as checking the hash. The only sure
way is to check the hash. It's a waste of time (and everybody's server
bandwidth) to download again because you think the size may be wrong, or
because you got a bad burn.

I use the free program HashCalc from SlavaSoft to check the hash (I use
it on XP where I do my downloads, but it probably works on Vista too).

David Wilkinson

 

[Guest]

Well, drat. Even though the hatch numbers matched, the install aborted saying
it was it was missing files or they were corrupt. That seems odd, since I
thought the hatch numbers were a sort of guaranty? Maybe they only guarantied
the download but not the DVD burn. Drat. Does anyone have any ideas or
suggestions as to how I can try again?

Keith

 

[Mark D. VandenBerg]

Well, drat. Even though the hatch numbers matched, the install aborted
saying
it was it was missing files or they were corrupt. That seems odd, since I
thought the hatch numbers were a sort of guaranty? Maybe they only
guarantied
the download but not the DVD burn. Drat. Does anyone have any ideas or
suggestions as to how I can try again?

Keith

If the hash was good, you have a good ISO and a bad burn. Try reburning at
the slowest speed with no other applications running.

 

[Guest]

Thank you, Mark! I'll do that now. The slowest speed available to me is 2.4X
I think. Am I able to check the hash on DVD? It doesn't seem so (just tried).
I'll try burning again. Thanks!

 

[Guest]

Dang it! I burned another CD, and again the installation failed while
expanding the files. Here is the error:

Windows cannot installed required files. The file may be corrupt or missing.
Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the
installation. Error code: 0x80070017.

I doubled checked Hash MD5 and SHA1. They are still identical on my hard
drive.

I am using ImgBurn. I accepted all the defaults. Is there something I don't
know about burning an .iso to the DVD, or am I just having really bad luck
burning the .iso image to DVD?

I do note that the suggestion is to record at 1x or 2x, and for some reason,
this app or DVD (probably) only takes 2.4x as the lowest speed.

I really would love to start playing with Vista if I can. Any more
suggestions?

And, I really am grateful for the all the help and suggestions I've so far
received.

Keith

 

[David Wilkinson]

Dang it! I burned another CD, and again the installation failed while
expanding the files. Here is the error:

Windows cannot installed required files. The file may be corrupt or missing.
Make sure all files required for installation are available, and restart the
installation. Error code: 0x80070017.

I doubled checked Hash MD5 and SHA1. They are still identical on my hard
drive.

I am using ImgBurn. I accepted all the defaults. Is there something I don't
know about burning an .iso to the DVD, or am I just having really bad luck
burning the .iso image to DVD?

I do note that the suggestion is to record at 1x or 2x, and for some reason,
this app or DVD (probably) only takes 2.4x as the lowest speed.

I really would love to start playing with Vista if I can. Any more
suggestions?

And, I really am grateful for the all the help and suggestions I've so far
received.

Keith

:

sylvaticus:

I use Cburncdcc, free from terabyteunlimited.com. I have only used it on
Windows 2000, but I'm sure it works on XP (but maybe not Vista). I just
use the default settings, and it has never failed yet.

David Wilkinson

 

[Guest]

Thank you, David. I've installed it. Should I only check "Auto Eject" or
should I check one of the other options, like "Read-Verify" or "Finalize"?

Keith

 

[Guest]

Now I just lost my newest post. This has not been a good weekend. Sigh. I had
real hopes that I'd be a little further along than "unable to make a simple
DVD."

Well, to retype:

I found and downloaded BurnCDCC. I accepted the default and left checked
only "Auto-eject." After I burned the DVD, I put it in to install Vista. I
got the following two errors:

The application or DLL F:\Sources\ARunImg.dll is not a valid Windows image.
Please check this against your installation diskette. [OK]

The file 'autorun.dll could not be loaded or is corrupt. Setup cannot
continue. Error code is [0xE0000100 [OK]

Sigh. Why is this so hard. I've read many posts about problems with Vista
itself, but much fewer with created the DVD. I again checked the Hash
numbers, so I'm confident I have the proper .iso. My Key works fine. The
first two DVDs I could go through the introduction of the install, copied the
files, and failed on expanding them now, I have DVD that won't even start.

Is there something wrong my media (all blank, no scratches) or my drive
itself. Everything seems to indicate the drive is working (or I wouldn't have
gotten the install to start the last time, right?).

Is there anyone local to Minneapolis, MN (I live just off 35w and 94--just
off Chicago and Franklin) who has a DVD that's working? I'll happily drive to
a place convenient to you.

I don't want to ruin a 4th DVD.... I hope someone has a suggestion. Just to
be clear, I don't blame anyone (that includes MS). I just want to create the
stupid DVD so I can install it. My profound thanks to everyone who has helped!

Ketih

 

[David Wilkinson]

Thank you, David. I've installed it. Should I only check "Auto Eject" or
should I check one of the other options, like "Read-Verify" or "Finalize"?

Keith

[snip]

Keith:

I check all of these. Read-Verify roughly doubles the time taken, but it
is worth doing (though I have never seen it fail). I use Maxell DVD+R
16X media (not sure Finalize has any effect here).

David Wilkinson