Like myself, Im sure there are people here who are currently trying out Vista in one of its various guises. Practically, theres no reason to ditch XP for any Vista release as yet, but if like me you are curious as to the developments of Vista prior to its release then hopefully you will join in discussion about it here.
Ive spent some time during the weekend with the new 64-bit build of Vista, Beta 2 build 5308 and am thoroughly impressed by what Ive seen so far. Its meant to be a 'feature full' release, meaning everything that is meant to be in there is in the build, and its a case of bug-checking and fault-finding from now on.
Ive installed it to a seperate harddrive, D partition, and have no problems with it so far in as much as Im able to access standard XP with no difficulty at all, concerns I had about it affecting my existing OS were thankfully unrealised. Notably, and presumeably because of the HDD seperation, I cant boot to Vista without the DVD in the drive first, whilst XP itself doesnt even recognize Vista is installed at all by default. Id assume were you to install to the C drive, then a dual boot option without DVD-Rom would be present.
I joined my existing Windows 2003 Domain without any real trouble, and one thing I noticed was that my bluetooth keyboard and mouse was detected and useable at the very first stages of installation which was pretty impressive.
Visually it looks lovely, nicely designed transparant windows make for an attractive GUI, small effects like the glowing redness of the 'close window' X button give it a smart look. Im not convinced by the round startbar button yet though.
Other things like the preview panes that appear when you hover over a tab in the taskbar, and the various methods of cascading windows, and the 3d effect of task manager (optional) are all here.
I couldnt see how to access the sidebar in my version, but will look at this further as like the 3d task manager, I had to run a program to be able to access it.
In terms of performance, Im running a A64 3500 with 2GB of ram, and apart from a few curous periods where nothing seemed to be happening although I still had input response, its not too bad. Obvioulsly its unoptimized, but is perfectly workable in its current guise as a basic OS, and windows open and close. menus appear etc with most of the usual zip you would expect. The only driver which hasnt installed is for my soundcard.
Access to a working windows update (its not the same as the standard one) wasnt possible for me last night, clearly it may not exist at this moment, whilst Windows Defender also refused to update.
Ive spent some time during the weekend with the new 64-bit build of Vista, Beta 2 build 5308 and am thoroughly impressed by what Ive seen so far. Its meant to be a 'feature full' release, meaning everything that is meant to be in there is in the build, and its a case of bug-checking and fault-finding from now on.
Ive installed it to a seperate harddrive, D partition, and have no problems with it so far in as much as Im able to access standard XP with no difficulty at all, concerns I had about it affecting my existing OS were thankfully unrealised. Notably, and presumeably because of the HDD seperation, I cant boot to Vista without the DVD in the drive first, whilst XP itself doesnt even recognize Vista is installed at all by default. Id assume were you to install to the C drive, then a dual boot option without DVD-Rom would be present.
I joined my existing Windows 2003 Domain without any real trouble, and one thing I noticed was that my bluetooth keyboard and mouse was detected and useable at the very first stages of installation which was pretty impressive.
Visually it looks lovely, nicely designed transparant windows make for an attractive GUI, small effects like the glowing redness of the 'close window' X button give it a smart look. Im not convinced by the round startbar button yet though.
Other things like the preview panes that appear when you hover over a tab in the taskbar, and the various methods of cascading windows, and the 3d effect of task manager (optional) are all here.
I couldnt see how to access the sidebar in my version, but will look at this further as like the 3d task manager, I had to run a program to be able to access it.
In terms of performance, Im running a A64 3500 with 2GB of ram, and apart from a few curous periods where nothing seemed to be happening although I still had input response, its not too bad. Obvioulsly its unoptimized, but is perfectly workable in its current guise as a basic OS, and windows open and close. menus appear etc with most of the usual zip you would expect. The only driver which hasnt installed is for my soundcard.
Access to a working windows update (its not the same as the standard one) wasnt possible for me last night, clearly it may not exist at this moment, whilst Windows Defender also refused to update.
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