Recently I installed Vista beta 1 on my tablet. Not in Virtual PC but as dual boot. You need a dedicated partition for that, but it is the only way Vista can reach your machine's hardware functionality like DX or the digitizer tablet. The first install was nice but not really a tablet, after adding the TIP install it started feeling like the real thing. Despite my tablet having (relatively) meager specs it worked pretty well. I did have the occasional blue screens. As far as I can see these were caused by my external firewire CD drive and by me trying to do something which needs more memory than available; like loading a WPF application in VS 2005. Another way to blow up was trying to assign a read-only property of the InkCanvas in XAMLpad. Although you would expect Vista to fail gracefully in these scenarios......
Since the PDC there's beta 2, build 5219. I downloaded it from MSDN the beta site. My MSDN product key was refused by the setup. Luckily I had already found an entry in Tim Sneaths blog which provided a product key which worked. Have taken that hurdle setup refused to load the DVD image. Starting the setup from XP, instead of booting form the DVD worked better. The setup itself rolls on unattended but does not install any network drivers; just the one for the Infra red device. I wasted some time in the Install Supplemental drivers part of Vista. I'm not quite sure but that looks like a little messed up. First of all it was looking for a file DriverRepository.idx, the only thing available was driverre.idx (an 8.3 filename !). Having fed that to the driver installer it was still no success, kept complaining about failing to install. What did work was installing the drivers the classical way. Go to control panel/system/device manager. You can see the missing drivers there. Select update driver and tell Vista you will manually pick a driver from the list. Both my wired and wireless driver were in the list of compatible drivers and setup went perfect.
Now I have a connected Vista tablet. It does include the InkBall game. Still very nice but it shows that you can get RSI with a pen s well. The tablet functionality in beta 2 is very good. For a good description and review of that I warmly recommend Collin Walker's article. The TIP (Tablet Input Panel) has had quite an overhaul since the first Vista preview. The two sym buttons have turned into a sym button which list quite an impressing list of symbols and a web button which now lists .nl and not .uk. In the control panel I set regional setting to the Netherlands, .nl is our top level domain. The only thing still missing is a handwriting recognizer for the Dutch language.
There is a setting for touch screens, by default that is switched on. The real new thing for a classical tablet are the flick gestures; see Collin Walker's article for a good review of those. The 5219 build still occasionally produces blue screens on my machine (Acer CT 111) but is on the average smooth to work with; although it sometimes stalls in the TIP. Right now I'm installing the WPF SDK. I don't doubt the traditional ink apps still work, and now I want to see more. To be continued (in the next weekend :)).