Summary: Here's a list of issues, helpful notes, known problems and workarounds for the PDC "The Goods" beta discs. Please feel free to annotate these notes with your own thoughts.

Installing Windows Vista

* To get the best experience of Windows Vista, install it on a separate partition rather than attempting to run it within Microsoft Virtual PC. Update: link to an unsupported set of Virtual PC Additions that enabled Windows Vista has been removed by request of the Virtual PC team. Sorry.
* You'll experience problems if you try to mount the ISO we ship on the DVDs directly into Virtual PC. That's because Virtual PC doesn't support ISO images of greater than 2.2GB. To work around this, either burn the image to a physical DVD and then mount that or alternatively use an alternative tool to mount the ISO as a drive. Further details and link to tools at http://blogs.msdn.com/virtualpcguy/archive/2005/06/09/427443.aspx

* In general, there's better driver support for desktops than for laptops.
* To enable glass, you'll need an LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model) driver, at least 64MB of discrete video memory and DirectX 9 support in hardware.
* A number of Dell and other laptops have Broadcom 440x integrated network cards. The Windows XP driver for this card works on Windows Vista, but it will cause a blue screen crash on machines with more than 1GB memory. To resolve this problem, edit the boot.ini file to add a /maxmem=1024 switch for the Windows Vista partition. This will reduce the available memory for this partition to 1GB. Alternatively, you can of course disable the network driver.
* Where is IIS? It was part of the beta 1 built but the world wide publishing service does not appear to be installed in the PDC build. Does any know how to get IIS installed on the PDC build of Vista?
* Many people have reported a problem attempting to install both the Beta 1 and the PDC builds from a physical DVD burned from the ISO image (X86) directly to separate partition (no Virtual PC). It has been seen with the Longhorn server PDC builds, as well. This problem occurs when the DVD is booted to perform the installation, and sometimes also when the installation is launched within Windows from a physical DVD. Immediately after the product key is entered, and accepted, the error "An error occurred while setting the image info" occurs, in a message box captioned "Window's Setup". Does anyone know what is causing this error, and how to work around it?

Windows Vista Product Keys

See http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2005/09/21/472506.aspx if you're struggling to activate Windows Vista builds or the product key you're using is being rejected by Windows Vista setup.

Windows Vista and Developer Tools

* Build 5219 of Windows Vista incorporates .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2. Make sure you install the matching Beta 2 release of Visual Studio 2005.
* The .NET Framework 2.0 Release Candidate is not compatible with Windows Vista. Windows Vista has an integrated .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 2 build; moving forwards, the .NET Framework will become an intrinsic part of the operating system and will be serviced through Microsoft Update. The Beta 2 release of Windows Vista will contain the RTM build of the .NET Framework 2.0.
* Before you install Visual Studio 2005 itself, manually install the MSXML 6.0 Parser from the wcu/msxml subdirectory. This is a known bug in the Beta 2 installer that has subsequently been fixed, but without pre-installing this component you may experience a failure during the main Visual Studio 2005 install.
* When installing the WinFX Runtime Components, if you get an error that indicates that the Windows Workflow Foundation needs to be uninstalled, run the following command line:

		      msiexec /x {B644FB52-BB3D-4C43-80EC-57644210536A}
	

* (Has anyone managed to make this work on build 5112?)
* To install the Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for WinFx September CTP (Beta) on Disc 4 you have to download the WinFx SDK and install it first. You can get the sdk at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=C20CC6C8-1F4E-4A5C-BC79-C2FE9ABE69AA&displaylang=en
*Has anyone gotten Windows Workflow Foundation from disc 4 to work with Visual Studio 2005?
* The "Synchronization Manager" documentation in the Platform SDK is corrupt. Click Networking > Network Management > Synchronization Manager, and get an error about not being able to find syncmgr.hxs which is in the directory it is looking in. Anyone know a work around?

Other Windows Vista Issues

* With Windows Rights Protection enabled on the registry, processes started with elevated tokens cannot use Speech Recognition or Text-to-Speech / Speech Synthesizer. The workaround is to create another administrator account or normal user account for using SR / TTS. This account can be a domain account if you can add the Windows Vista machine to the domain.

Installing from an Extracted ISO Image

* There seems to be a key validation error that can be overcome if you burn the ISO to a DVD.
* The validation error occurs if you extract the ISO to your hard drive using the free version of ISO Buster (extracting the ISO files instead of the UDF files). If you don't have a DVD burner available you can use "Deamon Tools" (http://www.daemon-tools.cc) to mount the ISO and copy the files to your hard drive.
* The reason for this error is that some ISO extraction tools don't preserve long filenames, so several of the product key DLL files get extracted with the wrong names (e.g. pkeyconf.xml instead of pkeyconfig.xml). Check out the following blog entry for further details: http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2005/09/28/474977.aspx

Online downloads available:

* Atlas -- http://atlas.asp.net
* Max -- http://www.microsoft.com/max

Installing SQL 2005 RC1 - WMI error

Is anyone else getting an error about WMI not being configured correctly, error 2147746132, when installing Yukon? I haven't seen this error when working with the April CTP build.