Tonight I installed Vista RC2.

I haven’t played around with it yet, but it looks fairly much the same.
Install time was down a little, again. Overall though, not much is initially different.

A few people have suggested I get the Battlefield 2142 Demo, and have a go… so, I did. Infact, after installing a few drivers (to make Sound go) and Firefox, that’s pretty much the only things I’ve done.

So… how did the BF2142 Demo go? Well.. it’s a little rocky.

Step 1: Install the Game.
This isn’t hard. You run the installer. It installs.

Step 2: Run the Game …or not.
I got this lovely error message.

Luckily Paul had a link for me in IRC… so on to:

Step 3: Install DirectX9

I Downloaded the “D3DX All Updates” from this page, extracted the zip file and ran as admin.

Step 4: Run the game, and register account.

You’ll need to register an account, but if you’ve played any EA game online (like, Battlefield 2, for instance) - you’ll probably find your account name isn’t available. This is something EA needs to fix.

Step 5: Find that Punkbuster doesn’t like Vista’s default settings.

Any game server you try and join that has Punkbuster, will boot you out if you’re not running BF2142 as an Admin.

This is… not great, but acceptable.

Step 6: Run BF2142 as Admin