Vista RTM Experiences, Week 2

I’ve been running Windows Vista Enterprise RTM (6.0.6000) for over a week, and have mostly positive experiences. Vista and Office 2007 RTM together are amazing, and have already increased my productivity. I’m running a upgrade from XP SP2 on a HP nc8430 laptop that’s only a few months old. Here are some issues I’ve been having that will hopefully help some of you confirm that your not the only one with them. I’ve got coworkers running the same build and I’ll indicate when I’m not the only one having it.

• Offline Files is by far the biggest issue. It seems to be very temperamental, and I never know what I’m going to get. Different ‘partnerships’ come and go. I’ll have two different shares sync’ed to the same server and it will see one as offline, and one as online. Running over Microsoft VPN only seems to exacerbate this issue. Offline file sync’s take A LOT of CPU power. You can’t terminate a partnership from the GUI, and the old csccmd.exe tool doesn’t work in Vista. Can’t seem to find technet docs on this subject.
• Sadly, the egg timer Gadget is gone in RTM.
• This isn’t really news, but we need drivers. ATI’s video has bugs, my Bluetooth modem doesn’t work, USB thumb drive has issues (bluescreened when I change the write cache option), and I’ve got two unknown devices.
• The new user profile layout is very confusing and I can’t find any technet documentation about it. You have a ‘Documents’ folder but that doesn’t seem to use GPO folder redirection. Instead I now have a separate shortcut in my profile to my redirected ‘My Documents’ as well as the other folders like Video, Music, etc… giving me two of most folders (one local and one redirected).
• New advanced power profiles are great for customizing, but there is no feature to ‘disable screensaver if on battery’; which I would think would be a common request and a good way to save battery on the go. I love the new screensavers but can’t use them as they’ll drain my battery out of the office.
• Much of Microsoft’s admin tools arsenal doesn’t work or warns that it won’t work on Vista. Forcing me to use a XP Virtual PC to do many network admin tasks.