James, tough luck, man. I feel your pain. I spent 5 hours today trying to install RC2 and build 5728 on my tc4200. It doesn’t work for me. With RC2 it hangs in setup, and with 5728, I get a FILE MISSING during setup.

Which, oddly enough, I have had file missing errors when installing XP before, too.

Now I’m wondering….

Can one of you guys who have RC2 on a tc1100 send me a screen shot of the Graphics adapter info from the Device Manager?

JK: I also installed RC2 from scratch on a spare hard drive in my TC1100. After a couple of drivers downloaded from HP’s site, it works perfectly well (screen rotation, IE7 and other things) so far. No troubles. Not sure why you are experiencing this; hope it gets better.

JK

Sorry you are having so much trouble. For the record (shared with you privately), I did end up doing a clean install for RC2 (build 5744).

IE7
I didn’t have to do it, but some have reported that problems with IE7 can be cleared up by deleting temp files in
\user\Appdata\temp

(thanks for this hint go to GBM user Pyxus)

Put it on Flash! Saw it running on a Q at DL, and IE7 worked fine.

…droooool…

This morning I reinstalled RC2 for the third time. I formatted the partition so nothing would be lingering and did another clean install from DVD. It ran fine and the only difference I see this time is IE7 did not crash once until I rebooted, now it won’t run at all. Windows Update tells me it doesn’t find any updates to install for my device, yet several devices are flagged int he Device Manager. Onc of them is the Wacom Serial Pen which is probably the reason for all the access violations I am getting. At this point I’m almost ready to pass on RC2.

Typing this from a TC1100 with Vista RC2 right now, I can say my experience was very much the opposite of yours, JK. I did a clean install onto a second partition and after connecting to my wireless network, I ran the integrated Windows Update which found all the drivers I need. Video works great (even automatic rotation!) and I don’t have a single exclamation mark in the device manager. I had to install the HP Q Menu and the Button Driver, which doesn’t entirely work. But overall, my experience has been excellent. No TIP problems, no IE7 problems. I’d say you need to reinstall! As a side note: I installed from a USB DVD drive. Good luck!

I installed RC2 on my m200 with no problems, it was just as responsive as Windows XP. Definitely what i’d call a solid install. It detected all drivers, the only “error” i encountered was that i could no enable aero glass, but i found on other forums that it was a known bug of RC2 and that there was a registry fix, i changed a value in the registry and glass was enabled with no problems. I am running a 1.5 ghz, with 1gb ram.

I hear what everyone is saying about older hardware and Vista but let me provide some food for thought. The hardware in the HP tc1100 I use is representative of the hardware in just about every Tablet PC sold in the past 12 months. That indicates that Vista is not going to be a viable upgrade option for virtually everyone using a Tablet PC. That’s what I’m gleaning from this conversation, anyway.

My ViewSonic V1250 and I have seen better Vista releases. My major issue is that the wireless card never wakes up after a Sleep, resulting in a BSOD. I can’t read any of my SD cards. I hate not being able to change my color scheme (hopefully someone will soon figure out and publish UI hacks).

Sorry JK, you just had a bad experience. I installed RC2 on both my tablet (acer) and home pc. Both installs were solid. Found all the drivers for my nVidia GPU (aero glass included). My wife loves it so I KNOW very close to be ready for Prime-time. As Josh has said, the old hardware is just too old for a next generation OS like Vista.

I think that we should go back to calling it Longhorn until Microsoft gets their act together and actually releases the product to the public.

After some (ok alot of) initial troubles, Vista RC1 is running great for me and I don’t plan on upgrading until RTM. I don’t think it’s exactly fair to say that Vista is not ready for prime time, however based on your experience with one particularly old Tablet PC model that even by most optimistic predictions, only shipped maybe 100,000 units.

My experience installing Vista on 3 Tablet PC’s and a Media Center desktop makes it pretty obvious that the newer the hardware, the better off you are. My Media Center (HP m7334n) and my Gateway CX2724 convertible notebook, both of which were purchased within the last year, installed and ran Vista smoothly. The Motion LE1600 installed almost everything ok, but a few missing hardware features like fingerprint scanner and glass doesn’t work. The Electrovaya SC2000 was by far the worst install experience I’ve had, but still not all that bad. Same thing with the fingerprint scanner not working but I had to connect a wired network to get the wifi drivers. Still no glass and it’s not too speedy.

But my point is, Vista’s success will have little or nothing to do with old machines upgrading to Vista. It’s all about new computer sales that *will* come with Vista and have everything working out of the box.

In my experience, Vista is indeed ready for prime time and ready or not, it’s coming in November!

Sorry to hear about your problems, RC2 installed fine on my tc4200, and has been troublefree since. After using it since RC2 came out though, I have to say that other than a more attractive UI, the tablet specific features are to me, the only reason to use this vs. XP. The TIP, and speech recognition are fantastic upgrades vs. XP, the extra security related taps to ok things, I could do without. I realize that the security related things are more geared toward the average, non-tech savvy user. Anyone with Spybot, an Antivirus, and a clue about what NOT to click on when surfing the internet, is going to be slowed by these things.

Hey, for future reference, Partition Magic would have allowed you to set the primary partition when you performed your first resize, avoiding the first problem. After that… now I’m reconsidering installing Vista RC2 on my delivered-next-week R1F.

Yes, WNewquay got his working OK by performing an upgrade to RC2 over RC1 which I don’t want to do. I wanted to test how “ready” RC2 is on its own.

I suspect that those who report RC2 working fine on the tc1100 used the same upgrade method and it’s important to remember that they likely jumped through a few hoops to get RC1 running OK which is why the upgrade works so well for them. I was hoping to have a similar experience with RC2 on its own, as the OS should be getting close to “install and go” functionality.