Vista Beta 2 (Now Public And Free)

[SOAPboy]

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx

Doing some system stuff and gonna install here in the next hour..

SOOO Excited

[TOK]

Its a kludge right now. Install a regular OS unless you want to do the whole thing over again.

[SOAPboy]

Its a kludge right now. Install a regular OS unless you want to do the whole thing over again.

Its a kludge?

Dude, its runs GREAT considering support isnt all that wonderful from companys like creative..

Had it dual booting (you know, that amazing technology where you can run both), played some WoW, did some surfing. ect. Damn fine O/S..

Found, most people thus far who havent liked it, have a TON of addon cards, like weird low end NiCs, offbrand (hell even creative, drivers for beta are shite) sound cards, and LOW END video cards.. or simply dont have enough Ram )or enough computer in general for that matter)...


GIve it a shot on a computer worth its weight, and its a quality O/S.

[TOK]

Unless the Beta is substantially improved from a month ago, you just haven't run into issues yet. What are your system specs and boot time?
What stats does Vista report for you on the system rating app?

I didn't run it on my main PC, but the one I did run it on was a 2ghz AMD with a gig of RAM and a GeForce Ti4200. Definitely not cutting edge, but at least on par with what most typical users are going to be using. I don't use any crap hardware, I built all my machines.

[SOAPboy]

Unless the Beta is substantially improved from a month ago, you just haven't run into issues yet. What are your system specs and boot time?
What stats does Vista report for you on the system rating app?

I didn't run it on my main PC, but the one I did run it on was a 2ghz AMD with a gig of RAM and a GeForce Ti4200. Definitely not cutting edge, but at least on par with what most typical users are going to be using. I don't use any crap hardware, I built all my machines.

3000+ AMD64 939
2gigs pc3200 (flat 2-2-2)
7800GTX

score of 3.

Boot time, from actual O/S load start, about 30ish seconds..

Gig of ram, hate to say it, isnt enough. Basicly, your machine is what my old mame box is, which my GF plays WoW on currently.. and i wouldnt put vista on it if it was the only O/S in my home..

Try it on a nicer machine, experiance is much more pleasent im sure.

Before anyone says "ZOMG 1gig isnt enough is ---That which is odiferous and causeth plants to grow---", its true, and its not enough.. Vista, by itself uses about 720 megs.. 2 gadgets running.. Mind you, when opening a 3d app like WoW or w/e it shoots up slightly, 900ish, so its dumping the o/s stuff it dont need once the game loads, which is a nice touch..

I "Think" its better than it used to be.. i had 1 BSOD, which was very much my fault. after that it ran near flawless.. It still needs help in the DirectX department, thats for sure, but its getting there..

[Howard_Casto]

I think everybody knows what a m$ mark I am, but if what you say is true and 1 gig or ram isn't enough then this particular os truely is too bloated to be useful. 

We haven't even gotten to the point where games running on xp will all the bells and whistles need more than 1 gig of memory.  (Now video card's are something all-together different.) The thing that hurts it even more is the fact that xp is a really good os.  It was an obvious choice in upgrading between 9x and xp because 98, while a decent os, was total crap compared to xp.  From what I've seen of vista so far, the only thing it really does differently is use a dfferent type of structure, which isn't faster or more stable, and merely makes a lot of your old apps/hardware/ect defunct. 

I intend to get it myself and look into it, but when I'm not super-optimistic the average m$ hater should be running from it like the plague. 

[JonnyBoy]

I agree with Howard, 1 gig of ram usage seems...bloated. Hopefully they do some severe streamlining before it's commercial release. But XP is still a good enough OS for the masses (with slower computers) until technology pushes us into an upgrade.

[SOAPboy]

I agree with Howard, 1 gig of ram usage seems...bloated. Hopefully they do some severe streamlining before it's commercial release. But XP is still a good enough OS for the masses (with slower computers) until technology pushes us into an upgrade.

Im sure if i killed a ton of the pretties, i could get it down to under 500 megs..

Remember, glass windows, and all that add up real fast..

[TOK]

My next question for you was what you liked so much about it that you didn't get from XP. Its the visuals?
I'm not much into fluff, so while I liked the security suite they bundled with it, I really didn't get much else out of the OS. As a gamer, I'm amazed you'd prefer the bloated mess of Vista over something lean.

Microsoft hasn't pushed it back twice, and now gone public with the Beta for nothing.

[AtomSmasher]

I have a feeling Vista will be as necessary of an upgrade as XP was to 98, but I'm waiting for the final release before upgrading.  And the new version of Direct X is looking pretty sweet, I'll probably upgrade my video card when Vista comes out just so I can fully support it.

[SOAPboy]

My next question for you was what you liked so much about it that you didn't get from XP. Its the visuals?
I'm not much into fluff, so while I liked the security suite they bundled with it, I really didn't get much else out of the OS. As a gamer, I'm amazed you'd prefer the bloated mess of Vista over something lean.

Microsoft hasn't pushed it back twice, and now gone public with the Beta for nothing.

How it felt..

Something about how it ran, when i navigated around felt really natural.. I have enough machine, that a little bloat isnt going to hurt anything so why not?

Bloadted Mess :

[SirPoonga]

I think the bloat is because it is beta.  At work we found a memory leak with explorer.

I tried to install the 64 bit version at home.  Ran well, booted fast, liked it.  But a DVD-RAM driver kept corrupting causing Vista to not boot.  So I installed the 32 bit version.  It runs fine except now my 360 isn't talking to MCE (though I have an idea on how to fix that).  UT2k4 runs fine on it.  Installing the Catalyst drivers helped quite abit.

I have a
AMD64 3200
1gig mem
ATI 9550 256meg

I will have to try to find this system scoring app.

It is alot like OS X though.  The dock, er, sidebar is kinda like the OS X dock.  The file browser is almost spot on with OS X's file browser.  The start menu is a little different, will take getting use to.  Same with the control panel, especially the networking.

Security seems better.  My company's software ran into an issue with the registry.  MS creates a virtual registry thing.  Also to do a bunch of the admin stuff you have to give permission like you do in unix. 

Basically, Microsoft has taken all the good ideas from other OSes and put their own twist on it.

I agree, need more memory for the beta.  The glass stuff is so pretty though

I am probably going to upgrade my computer and get vista once it comes out.  I will want to play Shadowrun and Huxley against the 360 folk and be able to play UT2k7.

Oh yeah, the real time popup of a program that is minimized is nice when installing stuff or replicating a whole bunch of databases.  A trick since XP is minimize a program to gain some memory back.  With vista you just hover your mouse over the app to popup a real time window of it.  Very helpful.

[shmokes]

I've got it and I'll probably do some partition magicking to dual boot it on my main computer at work tomorrow.  I'm pretty excited to see what it's like, even though I assume at this point that it's pretty incompatible, buggy and resource hoggy.  I think I'm running an AMD 64 3200+ or something with 2 gigs of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9800 or so.  That should be plenty to give me as good an experience as possible with BETA software.

. . . We'll see.

[Zero_Hour]

I loaded it up on a stock Gateway P4 system here at work, but I didn't dual boot it, as I didn't want to deal with potential issues on that end. Here are some of my thoughts:

Least interactive install of any version of windows I've used (pretty muche everything from 3.1 up), which IMO is a good thing, fewer reeboots, less clicking and such. While a corporate IT dept. will usually be doing unattended installs, it's still nice to see how the process is going to work for the average end user.

The network detection / setup is a little more coherent than it has been in past versions.

Only two devices were not detected and configured properly after the initial install - An epson scanner (which I did not even realize was still connected, so I had no expectations of it being set up), and the Creative soundcard, which a quick visit to Windows update fixed.

The interface is very pretty, and if you use OSX and/or Linux you will see lots of things that remind you of those GUIs. I think that the interface as a whole is improved over XP, but that's ultimately a matter of opinion. It's nothing too different from XP, just more refined.

I'm not running a state of the art video card, and only 512MB of ram, but overall I'd say it is running comprably to XP, though I have to start loading up some apps and really compare.

I'm very interested in finding out more about the Bitlocker disk encryption, which I haven't played with yet. The idea of having my personal machines disks encrypted is sweet, but the idea of the machines here at work encrypted by an end user is a potential nightmare waiting to happen, I suspect

It is certainly not ready for prime time, but if you are the type that likes to play with the new toys as soon as you can, I'd say it's worth the download. I have heard from numerous folks saying stick to the 32bit version regardless of processor, as driver support is not particularly good for the 64bit yet.

[Harry Potter]

sounds like it's a good idea for at least two generations of this OS to pass by before installing.

[SirPoonga]

Oh, one thing to note that was cool.  When installing the catalyst drivers it didn't ask to reboot.  it started the drivers after installing.  Screen flickers a couple of times, went out for abit, then came up with the ATI software running

That will be a cool feature, if you can install all drivers without rebooting

If you install beta 2 definately run bare minimum PC until it is installed.  A coworker's machine blue screened during install because of a USB wifi adaptor not being supported.  It installed fine once the adaptor was not present.  So play it on the safe side only have monitor, mouse, and keyboard hooked up.

I am definately getting this version of Windows.  Especially since new games will be requiring it.  Definately not an OS for arcade machines though.  I'd still keep with 98 or XP for arcade machines.