Windows Vista Beta - Who's Running it ?


The Beta has been out for a while and recently Microsoft have released it for download , or buy it on DVD. For those thinking of giving this beta a trial then think again as it aint as stable as you think. For those who are interested please read below.

-Remember this is a Beta , don't go removing your Working XP/2000 installation , install on a new partition or create one !
You also need a product key from MS which expires in a couple of month's ! .

I downloaded the 32Bit .ISO file which was about 3-4Gb in Size, I downloaded it using DAP ( Download Accelator Plus ) My download got cut off around 2Gb and had to resume it, after burning it onto DVD , I created another parition which has to be NTFS not FAT32 otherwise it wont install. I decided to boot the DVD from DOS , after a couple of minutes i got the Blue Screen fatal exception error, typical Microsoft, after rebooting again I was promted with the options , e.g Country, Language, Select Drive to install on etc all going well , after 15 minutes the installation Failed, due to a code error (No Message just Code 123456 etc Error). This is just great.

After booting my original XP installation i got onto google and did a search for the Error code, it turns out that the .ISO file was corrupt, and the MD5 Hash did not match the original one. Yes it was the Download Application DAP which must of corrupted it on the resume. After trying again using the Microsoft Download Manager , Akaimi or something it worked fine.

I decided to install from Windows rather that booting up in DOS and it worked fine just run the setup.exe from your DVD drive, the installation took around 20-30 Minutes on a 2.2Ghz AMD Chip with 1Gb RAM, the installation isn't very specific on what files it is copying so becarefull.

Time for the first boot in Windows Vista Beta ! , It took some time to boot there is no display screen just the same progress bar you see in XP & 2000 , The first screen is the Create User Account screen (Admin), Once you have logged in you are bombarded with lots of new Microsoft suprises such as Microsoft Defender, which is so annoying you cant even delete a file without Admin Right's and it still prompts you every time you want to delete a file. The Interface , Taskbar , Menu and the Widget Side bar are very cool, with the Glass Effect even though it does slow down performance a little.

Ok once you have logged in, you need to do the following otherwise your going to be really pissed off in 10 minutes , goto Control Pannel , notice all the posh icon's , I switched to classic view otherwise you wont know what anything is, goto User Accounts, and Disable UAC ( User Account Control ) This thing limits everything you do and is very annoying. Also Disable the Firewall, and the Windows Defender as these really do eat up Memory Resources and drive you crazy,

One thing you will notice with Vista is that you will have to re-install all your Drivers for your Sound Card's / Video Driver's windows did detect these at start up but finding those CD's with the drivers on does take a while. After a couple of minutes I had Sound & Video drivers working, I had to buy a new USB ADSL Modem , when installing many setup.exe from old CD's you do get lots of messages saying wrong OS version, to get around this just explore the cd and run the setup.exe manually, basically skip Auto Run.

Things that I Like about Windows Vista Beta

- Unix Filesystem Navigation , on the address bar in explorer you can click on Directorys rather than clicking Back a few times.
- Glass Desktop Effect, very smooth taskbar with ability to custom your glass color also the effect.
- Heavy Security Tool's , Even though very annoying MS have added restrictions on everything, even running single applications !
- Lots of more Control Pannel program's, more user friendly.
- Fade In / Fade Out Effects on Login.
- Better Views regarding explorer displaying icons , thumbnails etc.

Negative's

- Not much Support for installing new Device's , and identifying them using the Internet.
- Same Login Screen but with a different Display
- Not enough information on the new security added , e.g UAC, Defender , Malwar Applications.

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" You bet your ass we're all alike... we've been spoon-fed baby food at school when we hungered for steak... the bits of meat that you did let slip
through were pre-chewed and tasteless. We've been dominated by sadists, or ignored by the apathetic. The few that had something to teach found us will-
ing pupils, but those few are like drops of water in the desert."