So I'd like some input from other beta testers on what programs you have working and what ones don't. Here's some of mine.

Working:

AdAware SE 1.6

Spybot S&D 1.4

CS eTrust EZ Armor Anti-Virus Vista Ed. This one just came out so I was able to unload the Norton PCcillin which was a major resource hog. It was using 50,000k of memory with everything turned on. But it wasn't problematic.

Office 2007 Beta (DUH!) It got corrupted the first time and I couldn't uninstall it, or reinstall it so I could uninstall it so I could reinstall it. It worked fine the second time I reinstalled Vista.

MusicMatch 10

Adobe Reader

Deepnet Browser

nVidia 88.61 x86 Vista video drivers

iespell

EULAlyzer

Moffsoft Free Calculator

Jasc PaintShop Pro 8.0 (slow load)

What doesn't work:

AIM I tried to force it and it was a nightmare to get rid of.

Spyware Blaster

Spyware Guard It worked but was such a slow load at startup I removed it.

Motherboard Monitor5 It would crash if I enabled CPU usage, and would not work displaying IDE hard drive temps. Then after a bit it would stop working intermitently, so i gave up on it.

I really haven't anymore to add right now. But t would be nice if others would post your lists as well.

I've been looking for such a list, I don't wanna go installing stuff that might make me have to re-install everything again lol. Anyway things I have working without ny problems...

DUMeter (Monitors Bandwidth)
Steam (Halflife 2)
Battlefield 2
Skype
Office 2003
k-Lite Codec Pack
Windows Live Messenger Final
MsgPlus 4
Mozilla Firefox and Plugins

Will add more as I test them.

Avast anti virus and Tiny firewall work great plus they are free.

Won't work

Alcohol 120% v. 1.9.2.1 won't create the virtual drive. It BSOD'd me.

U.S. Robotics 5399B V92 Win Fax Modem keeps crashing on startup and giving a device failed to start error box. Device manager shows it working properly.

Musicmatch 10 has stopped working. I'm getting a C++ runtime error.

Works

jrDirectory printer

Audacity 1.2

HijackThis

Everest Home Except for the sensor readings. Since mobo monitor5 had problems with the sensor as well, it seems there is an issue with Vista reading the mobo sensors.

It definitely has some strange quirks (maybe even some quarks floating around <g>). I was loading the browser I use, and I kept getting exceptions when I would try to open it. I finally had to uninstall then reinstall it without the news feed. Then I rebooted and reinstalled it over itself, treating it like an upgrade. Only the second time I went ahead and added the news reader. I then got a message saying the program didn't install correctly. I said it did, and rebooted. It's working fine now.

Initially the OS was really slow and crappy. Then I realized the spare drive I had installed to load Vista on was a 4800RPM. So I repartitioned my boot drive and loaded Vista on a new partition. But I'm still set up with a dual boot config with XP as the primary system on C. If nothing else I gotta say now that surfing is blazingly faster than XP ever was. I do have aero disabled. I still take a hit with the clear windows, and only a GB of RAM. It seems Vista is growing on me.

Anyone have a wireless network adapter working in vista 64bit?

Mine won't work. The Melco WLI-PCM-L11/GP no matter what driver I try. So I am going to buy a new wireless adapter but first need to know what people have working. Ideally something for a PCMCIA slot or USB (desktop computer).

Hi SNGX.

This is taken from Wikipedia.

You can find the full article HERE.

Regards Howard

Like with XP, right click on a blank spot on the desktop and open "personalize". You can also access it with the Personalization icon in the control panel. Click on appearance. You will see color schemes. The first one is Windows aero. That's the one that creates the transparent windows frame. When that is enabled you have options to control the degree of transparency and color. It is considered a resource hog and has no significant use other than cosmetic. If you are running Vista appearances Will open in the adjustment window. Scroll down and hit open classic appearances.

The second option Vista Basic gives you a nice solid colored light tan Vista style window. It is less demanding and allows the OS to operate quicker, most noticeably if you have a GB or less of RAM. There are no options for color change. The other options are for the old original style windows. i.e. 98SE etc. I'm currently running a P4 at 3.3 with 1GB of dual channel PC3200, and a FX5900XT with 128MB's of memory. If I choose to run Aero it does run fine and I see very little performance loss, but I'm a power user, so I have aero turned off. No one ever sees my computer so I have no need to impress.

Here's a wiki list of programs that Vista can run. Since it is a wiki article, I'm not familiar with who's posting what and how good they are, so take it with a grain of salt. I notice some programs appear in the will work list simultaneously with the won't work list.
Windows Vista Beta 2 Software Compatibility List

Are there any gamers out there using Vista? I'd really like to find a way to open the clock frequencies on the video card so I can overclock it.

A few more from this morning.

Works:
Cano Scan LIDE30 flat bed scanner driver and tool box utility

Arc Soft PhotoBase

QuickTime7 stand alone player (without the iTunes baggage!)

PowerDVD 5.0

Autoruns (sysinternals)

Resource Hacker

FavOrg

PageDefrag (sysinternals)

StarDownloader (free version)

Works6.0 (I gave up on Office'07 [12] Beta)

Restoration

Picasa2

Nero 6.0 Ignore the "This version is incompatble with this OS" message. Finish the installation, then install the 6.6 upgrade. I just installed the burner so can't say about the extraneous bundled features and music burning apps.

MusicMatch Plus 7.5

Java RE 1.5 v.7

Won't work:

CDBurnerXP Pro Gee, with XP in the name and it still doesn't work? (insert Homer Simpson voice here) DOH! Mmmm.........donuts!

Audacity 1.2 and 1.3 It was working, now it isn't. It's a program I use a lot so I'll keep trying. Error was about some file not registering correctly, which would make sense had it not worked the first time I installed it.

The long list of compatible Windows apps looks pretty much accurate... AIM is one notable exception, but I'm not a heavy user so I can definitely get by with AIM Express.

The thing that's keeping me from thoroughly testing which programs work and which ones won't has been an annoying -- and seemingly very common -- driver issue. I simply can't get my sound to work under Vista, and I've tried literally everything.

My primary sound card is an ancient Sound Blaster Live. (XP has it classified as a Live! Value, but in truth I bought it before there was a Value model.) Windows Update has drivers for it, and from what I can tell by checking multiple forums and newsgroups, some people have had luck with it. My problem is that I can't get that individual update (SB Live! Value drivers) to install correctly. I did try Microsoft's suggested method of disabling the Windows Update service, clearing its download folder, and restarting the service, but that was to no avail.

Then I tried disabling my SB Live! altogether, restarting to my BIOS, and enabling my onboard sound. No luck there either.

Has anyone managed to have luck with an SB Live! in Vista? I'm not expecting much -- after all, it is a beta, and driver issues are a given -- but I'd love to see how Vista handles my game collection, and sound is a rather important part of that.

Aiim was a tough one and is a bit odd. v.553598 doesn't work at all for me. Neither did Triton. But the previous v.553595 is up and running perfectly.

I have Realtek ALC650 [6.1] The Vista drivers on Realteks site gets an incompatable warning. But the Realtek drivers from winUpdate work. However they don't give me full control, and the equalizer function is gone completely. The other thing I noticed is when playing music on XP I set my amp volume (I'm running line out through a Sony receiver) to 35. That shakes the walls. On Vista I am having to go to 45 to get the equivalent volume. Even there, I seem to be losing some of the boom at the bottom end.

I did get motherboard monitor5 to work. As long as you don't enable CPU usage it's OK. At least for me.

Security. I dumped the Norton PCCillin, and went with the ezArmor ezAntivirus. That left me with the Windows Firewall and Windows Defender. Yesterday I went to Gibson Research and ran his ShieldsUp diagnostic. I was advertising my presence on the internet with a fog horn. Basically every port was answering the ping, even though they were announcing the port was closed. The interface for configuring the firewall is way too complex for normal everyday users, and the defaults for the firewall suck. So I uninstalled ez and reinstalled Norton. I'm running their anti-spy, anti-virus, and firewall, and Gibson is showing me in full stealth mode once again. Windows Defender has gone off of startup mode, and is set up for manual scan only. The one thing I like about Defender is it finds and cleans some rootkits. Funny, in performance ratings, they list Defender as a problem product that is slowing the shut down.

I've totally shut down user account control even though MS is asking people to keep it enabled. I have also disabled the security center so I wouldn't keep getting the annoying user account control is disabled pop-ups. I do think user account control is a good thing, but when I have to go through 3 different permissions pop-up windows, just to start Spybot S&D from a desktop icon is just excessive. They say they will tone it down in later builds. There is already a newer build but it's not been made available to the public.