So .. who ordered Windows Vista beta 2 today?

[Draylor]

I'm down with the retro theme, but downloading 4.1GBs at 50kB/s doesn't fly

Thats 50k/s more than it offered me. "Hi we're overloaded try later" is all Im offered.

It probably knows Ill hate it without seeing it.

 

[Sar]

Seen it on the beeb webby yesterday morning and signed up for it, but the d/l was maxed out at the time.

I'll try again later on.

 

[Sar]

Scratch that, getting it now at 176Kbps - should be nearly double that.

:/

2hrs to d/l.

 

[Draylor]

Download rates will vary wildly from person to person on this.

Download servers are provided by Akamai, via their usual DNS trickery youll be redirected to the nearest server to you (or based on whatever other criteria they are using at the time).

Its still likely to be pretty overloaded for everyone, but itll vary

 

[Escape]

Did anyone download the x64 DVD?
It's meant to be 4.1GB but the download completed at 3.75GB.

There aren't any MD5 checksums that I can see :\

 

[KevinUK]

Tom theres some mega cool features in there, I just cant think of any at the top of my head

Dont bother with the beta unless you like fiddling with new tech, just make sure you pre order it when it comes out!

I'll be installing the beta on an old PC I dont use anymore just to tinker.

 

[rynnor]

So what does this thing do, and why should I install it? My computer works fine.

Strangely I find myself with Tom on this - apart from a new Mac-esque look is there anything usefull in Vista?

 

[nath]

Strangely I find myself with Tom on this - apart from a new Mac-esque look is there anything usefull in Vista?

Some great security features!

 

[Chilly]

Do you work in software development? You certainly don't sound like you do.

Correct. What has that got to do with anything?

 

[ZiggY]

http://www.pcpitstop.com/news/rob/rcheng0606.asp put me off

 

[nath]

I expect and hope vista to be utter shit, but that article is a bit silly. Is the guy expecting that a new operating system be suitable to run on fairly old hardware? It's not like Mac OS where the new versions are released much more regularly and at a cheaper price. A new windows doesn't come along that often and so it's fair enough that it asks for a decent spec.

Plus, he quoted the spec for the "Premium" vista specced machine, a vista "Capable" pc is a lower spec. The eye candy is Windows Aero (afaik) and is disableablebibble.

 

[Trem]

I tried Linux yesterday, it made my balls bleed.

Lovely OS to install though and it has Arkanoid(Breakout) as one of its games which was nice.

 

[Tom]

Is it possible to have Linux and XP on the same hard drive? Would it fuck anything up?

 

[nath]

I've got XP and Linux running on my laptop. I don't think the windows boot manager doodah* can handle it, you have to use a linux one and it'll give you the option to go in to Windows or Linux.






















*Technical term.

 

[Escape]

I've had XP, Win2000 and Linux on the same hardrive.

It's not a problem, just install Linux last.

 

[Sharma]

Multi-booting with windows OSs = Fucking nightmare.

 

[JingleBells]

I have Windows XP and Ubuntu Lunix installed on one drive, I just followed a guide, such as http://phoenix.csc.calpoly.edu/~kvoelker/cgi-bin/counter/cis122/dual-boot.cgi & https://wiki.ubuntu.com//WindowsDualBootHowTo

 

[caLLous]

I expect and hope vista to be utter shit, but that article is a bit silly. Is the guy expecting that a new operating system be suitable to run on fairly old hardware? It's not like Mac OS where the new versions are released much more regularly and at a cheaper price. A new windows doesn't come along that often and so it's fair enough that it asks for a decent spec.

Plus, he quoted the spec for the "Premium" vista specced machine, a vista "Capable" pc is a lower spec. The eye candy is Windows Aero (afaik) and is disableablebibble.

Agreed, plus Vista isn't even at release candidate yet.

I followed XP's beta progression closely but the most recent Vista build I've installed is the December CTP (which crashed on the first install, I might add). With XP, they sort of put everything in relatively early on and then the last couple of pre-retail releases were refinement and performance gains (obviously they were a lot more than that but not major feature additions) so I *hope* that's what's going on here...

 

[Earl]

I'm running vista as my main OS on laptop now, because im fed up of running XP-Media edition (legaly), as it comes with loads of crap installed that I dont want. I installed xp (illegaly) and it keeps annoying me with windows genuine advantage so

Seems ok, I dont have aero, I guess it deems my 6? months old laptop of £1200 not good enough to run it

 

[Krazeh]

Well i've finally managed to get far enough to download Vista, is nice getting it a 1.77MB/sec tho, 30 mins for entire download

 

[old.user4556]

Correct. What has that got to do with anything?

Because you object so much to paying £12 for a complete test version of a cutting edge OS, where as I appreciate the sweat/blood/tears/effort/time that's gone into the software because I do work in development (and £12 is peanuts to me).

Yes it'll be buggy, yes it'll be flawed but I hope to get something out of it by perhaps participating in the feedback or getting a glimpse of what's to come so I can better prepare for the full release.

I'd rather pay a measly £12 now and know if it would be a waste of money spending £150+ on a proper copy in January 2007.

I'd bet that you have a large volume of warez.

Edit: I might add that it's not £12 for the software, but £12 for the shipping.

 

[nath]

I'd bet that you have a large volume of warez.

Hey I have lots of warez, don't lump us in the same category. Chilly is a cock for reasons completely independent of this fact.

 

[old.user4556]

Good point my friend, apologies.

 

[Sar]

Heh, Chilly's cockness aside, I'm using it atm.

Seems laggy, but then again I haven't installed ati drivers yet (they're d/l atm).

UI is nice, but the new file system is a fucking god awful pain in the arse.

 

[Kryten]

Running at at the moment, triple booted with XP and Ubuntu.
Out of about 4 other MSDN and not/so/public previous versions and releases, this was by far the most difficult to get installed due to the SATA Raid setup (silicon image) used on my AN7 motherboard. Installing from within XP was fine as long as I put some hastily modifed SATA drivers on a usb drive. However, every time it restarted during installation, on boot it killed the MBR and needed me to boot from my XP CD to use fixmbr. 3 times that happened, and now I've got to restore my ubuntu/grub boot loader thing once I remember how to do it (hunts for ubuntu live dvd)

So far so good though : new nvidia drivers were a must to make it not sluggish, they are available on www.nvidia.com. Sidebar is a nice touch, you can add "gadgets" to it such as a hand style clock, cpu/memory meter (if CPU moves under 100% usage theres something wrong!) calendars, calculators and some little mind games which might come in useful to office users pretending to work

My system isn't exactly top of the range (amd 2500 @ 2.2ghz, 1.5gb ram, gf6800GT) but everything is running smooth and it boots quicker than XP, however that may have something to do with the amount of crap installed therein.

All device drivers were loaded easily (onboard soundstorm sound, audigy 2 zs drivers, smbus/onboard devices, ide drivers and what not). The new style windows update works a little *too* silently for my liking but I believe that's changeable with the rest of the security settings. Media Player 11 is so far a little unresponsive but I suspect that's down to the speed of my system.

Later on I'll try and get some more multimedia applications running (graphics, dvd editing, games) and see how far it gets. I suspect the usual Quake style games wont have any issues as the OpenGL drivers from nvidia seem to work well.

 

[Sar]

Oddly, my audigy 2 zs drivers refuse to install.

:/

 

[Kryten]

Sar : did you use the ones from creatives site?
Despite being rather old (november 2005) they seem to work fine here.

 

[Sar]

Aye, tried the default ones that should be in the install of Vista, and the Creative ones.

Both hang when they try to install and time out...

:/

 

[WPKenny]

What did you use to get a mutli boot system with WinXP and Vista on it?

 

[Kryten]

Just started the Vista installation from within XP and chose a new installation, pointing it at my other blank NTFS partition. Did it itself, however as i said before, it did bugger up GRUB.