Windows Vista Discussion

Okay, I cant be the only one using the beta of Windows Vista right now. What are your impressions of it?

First off, it took a long time to get installed right. I had to resize the partition of my C: drive and created a new partition with the live version of the program GParted. First install didnt go well, things seemed to not work right, so I reformated the partition. However, when you uninstall, the irritating Vista boot loader remains. I had to take some steps to get it off. Then I started from scratch, and reinstalled agian.

This time, things seemed to work how they were supposed to. The drivers for my graphics card installed correctly, and the sound card drivers actually worked correctly this time.

Now for my impressions. Its very very nice and slick looking. Problem is, at times it feels like Im using a Mac . There are the little "widgit" thing in OSX here, but thy're called Gadgets, and can be kinda fun to toy with. I keep a gauge of my CPU and Memory usage on my desktop, which I like.

What I dont like is that the OS seems require permission to do almost anything, which while irritating, could help against viruses and such. It even wouldnt let me into the "users" folder on my XP partition without permission. I also cant get to the Run command without going to the Task Manager. Annoying. I dont like alot of the menu changes; I like menus more when they're tabed. The worst thing about it is that it seems to want to call out to the internet alot. One thing that bugged me durring the install of WMP 11 were the words: "Would you like to send info of your use to content providers?" Hell NO!

Internet Explorer 7... Its actually useable!! Tabs! Oh how I love tabs! Its also nice and slick, and not alot of stupid crap going on near the address bar. I like, I like. But I dont think it will switch me from Firefox too soon.


Anyway, I wont feel any rush to upgrade my operating system when it comes out. Its a nice system, but not really necessary IMO. I still like XP just fine, but I will be willing to upgrade when DirectX 10 games come out (Crysis), and I get a new computer ($$$$).

Anyone else using this beta?

I'm using IE7, but on XP and not Vista. It's not bad, but seeing as how it wasn't built for XP, there are things that annoy me.

edit: whoops. wrong reply. I somehow read that Jux asked how to "Find" it... must have been from an IM or something... anyway, if you people want it:



I hear you can get it on bittorrent....






...or if you want a direct download, you can go here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvist...y/preview.mspx


btw: HUGE download.

I spent this weekend installing the Vista on my personal machine and playing around with it. We're part of the MSDN at work and our boss has said everyone in the department needs to become very familiar with the program before we begin putting it into production after its release.

I backed up all the files I had on my machine and repartitioned and reformatted with XP Pro before I did the install. I was able to avoid these problems, but it was a pain in the ass and took a lot of time.

I agree. The new UI is really cool for about 30 min. and then you start to realize that it seems like a big waste. I shut most of it off, and now my desktop looks like XP with a new start bar and icons.

Like Gigatron_2005 said, the security is nice. It can almost be annoying at times, but I really like knowing what's going on in my machine and asked when important things happen. I've been using IE7 for awhile now, and its better then previous versions, but I'm still using FireFox the most (which is 100% compatible with the Vista Beta by the way). WMP11 is cool, but nothing really new from 10 except the UI. It looks cool but I'm not impressed with it.

Overall, I like Vista. It is very stable and secure for a beta, which gives me hope that the final releaser will be even better. The new UI is cool, but it can be turned all off for users that either don't want it or can't run it at those levels.

The only grip I have is the third party support for Vista. I would have though some of the larger developers would already be well on their way to having good beta drivers for Vista. I downloaded the Radeon Vista Beta drivers and they suck. Except for activating my pixel shaders and being able to push my resolution up farther, they don't do anything over what the standard built-in Vista ones did (the Catalyst Control panel even has tabs that are blank when you click on them). I'm checking the Omega drivers now to see if they have something better to use for the time being.

In the end, I know I'm going to switch over to Vista eventually, but IMO, for now there is no real reason to switch from XP.

I'm gonna have to format my PC soon and will probably give Vista a try when I do that.

Wow, I didn't know Vista was at that stage.

Can you make it look like classic windows like you can in XP? I don't like all the bells and wistles stuff.

i just downloaded the DVD....but never got a chance to install it yet....

but i do have IE7, its good, but i still like my Firefox better....due to the fact that they moved the back/foward/stop/refresh buttons in IE7 and its irritating trying to get used to it.

i tried Media Player 11 and that i uninstalled within a few hours cause you can't right click a mp3 and do a add to playlist, and the library setup sucks too....so back to MP10 i went.

I had to turn off completely that security garbage, it was driving me crazy! What's the point of an Admin account that is not an admin account? If I wanted that shit I would have used a limited account to begin with.

The nail in the coffin for me was the lack of Samba support. Without that my computer will not talk to XBMC and I use that on a daily basis.

Now I am making space on my second hard drive and will be putting the X64 version on that.

I used Vista back when it was still an Alpha build (Milestone 4 or 5 I think). Back then it was just XP with some improvements. The new Aero GUI wasn't there. I didn't use it too long either, my system is only a P3 and I was using VMWare, so I was running Windows Vista ontop of Windows 2000.

From the new screen shots of Beta 2, it's way better than what I tried out. Very sleek

Anyway, here's a good site on Vista with screen shots and also what the system requirements will be (See the end of Windows Vista Beta 2 Review, Part 1: The Big Picture)