Since my last post the only thing I have installed is the Visual Studio 2008 and SQL Server 2008 Development tools. Since then I have worked with the various apps and can report these items so far.

First, no problems as of yet with the development tools, although so far I’ve only been using SQL Server Management Studio.

WinAmp works OK for playing music, but when I rip a CD the Media Library doesn’t always refresh correctly. I have to exit WinAmp and restart. Note this only happened about 50% of the time, the other half it flickered, but recognized that I’d inserted a new disk.

The NVidia graphics drivers seem to crash fairly often, about one to two times a day. They usually restart and everything is OK EXCEPT the Zune software. The UI on it goes blank. It still works, it happened today while I was playing some music and the music kept on playing, you just can’t interact with it. So far I’ve used task manager to shut down the Zune software and then I can restart it. It will work fine after that (at least until the next time the graphics drivers crash).

Every so often everything just freezes. Mouse doesn’t work, no keyboard input, no screen updates. I’m guessing it’s a graphics issue, but not really sure.

When launching a Virtual PC, they seem to take a long time to connect to the network. They will eventually connect (5 minutes is about average). Just be patient.

The installer for the SQL Server 2000 Northwind database sample crashed while I was trying to install. Fortunately i was able to install by extracting the SQL scripts from the zip file and using them to create the pubs and Northwind databases. (I need these for some code samples).

Everything else I’ve used seems to work OK. So at this point I seem to have all my software installed, so now I’m going to settle in and let my focus return to Data Warehousing and Analysis Services.

Don’t forget the Alabama Code Camp coming up at the end of January. So far we’ve had no entries for Speaker Idol, so as of now your chances of winning that 1 year MSDN Subscription seem quite good!