http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/default.mspx
Go nuts. I'm downloading it as soon as traffic dies down, since I can't even get at it now.
Go nuts. I'm downloading it as soon as traffic dies down, since I can't even get at it now.
Vista Beta 2 - Public testing
Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/Vista Beta 2 - Public testing pffft. Later - like next year or so... :)
/me pokes his Vista DVD.
for me its - later, when harddrives comes in 50TB sizes and Graphics cards push raytracing faster than polygons.
Guess I'll just have to wait, Microsoft's servers are a little bit busy right now.
You'd think the dullards would make use of bittorrent, or their own take on p2p, peernet.
You'd think the dullards would make use of bittorrent, or their own take on p2p, peernet.
Their upgrade advisor is working in a very peculiar way. I have six hard discs connected to my machine and only the C: disc has less than 15 GB of free space. The rest of the discs vary between 30 and 120 GB of free space. It did not stop the upgrade advisor to "advise" me that I cannot install Vista Beta 2 due to insufficient hard disc space...
Barney
Barney
yeah forget it now... it's probably like a feeding frenzy over there :)
nerds gone wild... or something like that... but ya gotta give them a lil understanding though... for most of em, this is better than sex...
and you may want to temporarily disable your win auto updates for a while as well...
:)
--Mike
nerds gone wild... or something like that... but ya gotta give them a lil understanding though... for most of em, this is better than sex...
and you may want to temporarily disable your win auto updates for a while as well...
:)
--Mike
Their upgrade advisor is working in a very peculiar way. I have six hard discs connected to my machine and only the C: disc has less than 15 GB of free space. The rest of the discs vary between 30 and 120 GB of free space. It did not stop the upgrade advisor to "advise" me that I cannot install Vista Beta 2 due to insufficient hard disc space...
It might be right. We had once problem with 3DMark installation because no matter WHERE the user wanted to install the proggie it needed X GB temp space in C drive (the destination install drive was ignored for this purpose).
A beta OS......I think I'll pass. ;/
(not to mention my 1st experiance with it on my tech's PC wasn't so pleasent)
(not to mention my 1st experiance with it on my tech's PC wasn't so pleasent)
XP was only good when they released the public RC2 version. Which was excellent.
XP was only good after SP1 =]
Good work, Noel. Thanks for the linkie, as always.
Good work, Noel. Thanks for the linkie, as always.
I don't think I'll be downloading 3.5gb worth just to see if it works ok with all my stuff. Then if it does work, do exactly the same things I'm doing now, but with a different interface and less free hard drive space.
If I do happen to like it then I'm left with the big possibility that the final release wont update the beta release (according to MS it may not be possible, which, in reality means not a chance), thus requiring a format and reinstall.
If I had a spare hard drive I'd give it a whirl, but I think I'll wait for the final retail release. If the final retail release works with Delphi 7, then I don't think I'll bother for quite a while. If it doesn't work with Delphi 7 and neither do the apps created with it, then I'll have to buy it along with Delphi 2006. I hope I don't have to go down that road early next year as I'd scream having to fork out all that money because of MS's new bloat fest.
If I do happen to like it then I'm left with the big possibility that the final release wont update the beta release (according to MS it may not be possible, which, in reality means not a chance), thus requiring a format and reinstall.
If I had a spare hard drive I'd give it a whirl, but I think I'll wait for the final retail release. If the final retail release works with Delphi 7, then I don't think I'll bother for quite a while. If it doesn't work with Delphi 7 and neither do the apps created with it, then I'll have to buy it along with Delphi 2006. I hope I don't have to go down that road early next year as I'd scream having to fork out all that money because of MS's new bloat fest.
You're moaning to the wrong people.
I'm probably gonna have to check out Vista. Supposedly, Halo2 is coming out on Vista. Also, MS is working on cross-platform gaming where PC Gamers will be able to play against Xbox360 players on the same game, and visa versa! So, that sounds cool. Anyway, Noel you're back again, dang it's leaving and never coming back, and coming back again, then leaving. ;)
But, nice to see you around. I know I haven't been around the forums in a while. I'm still jilted that the off topic forums have been missing for quite some time. Are they still here or are they gone forever? I really think it's a pity.
Anyway, just a side-note, I just changed jobs to Broadcast Journalist (I'm prior Marine, now Army), I just graduated BJ (heh...) and also made Honor Grad! <---means I'm cool.
Anyway, thanks for the heads up.
You still rock Noel. Your new website is awesome.
But, nice to see you around. I know I haven't been around the forums in a while. I'm still jilted that the off topic forums have been missing for quite some time. Are they still here or are they gone forever? I really think it's a pity.
Anyway, just a side-note, I just changed jobs to Broadcast Journalist (I'm prior Marine, now Army), I just graduated BJ (heh...) and also made Honor Grad! <---means I'm cool.
Anyway, thanks for the heads up.
You still rock Noel. Your new website is awesome.
And you're still really creepy O.o
Finnaly it allowed me to start downloading it. i have already tested vista and i have it here at work but its nice to have newer release to test. I quite like Vista when its working like it should.
all I know is a couple of years ago the cell was 1000 times faster than the fastest PC, a year ago it was 100, 6 months ago it was 40. Now its only faster at very specific things like streaming data.
Takes a lotta work.
You're moaning to the wrong people.
I wasn't moaning, I was expressing my opinion. You'll hear my moan when it hits retail :)
Are you gonna do a review on it when you've installed it?
all I know is a couple of years ago the cell was 1000 times faster than the fastest PC, a year ago it was 100, 6 months ago it was 40. Now its only faster at very specific things like streaming data.
You mean that whole parallelism thing like putting two cells together being just as effective completely escaped you?? OK, I installed the beta on a spare drive (took bloody ages to install BTW).
1) I can't get a route to the internet. My ageing DLink PCI NIC is apparently fully supported, but it refuses to pick up its config by DHCP.
2) My built-in NIC (nForce 4, never used) also doesn't work, the driver fails to install correctly.
3) My sound-card (Audigy ex platinum) has drivers, but they also fail to install properly (tried 2 methods).
The Vista interface is quite a slick idea and it is well implemented. A few graphical glitches manifest, but this is a beta, after all!
Responsiveness is not so good. I attribute this to everything being compiled with debug mode on (evidenced by mem usage over 700MB on boot) and with me running from an old 20GB Maxtor on plain ATA100.
I don't like how there seem to be half a dozen different ways into network configuration, and as many different options again to view the current network. Perhaps this just takes some getting used to. The individual options and views make sense on their own, but to have so many seems confusing. Average Joe's are not going to be pleased.
A shame that desktop backgrounds can't be zoomed to fill the screen whilst maintaining correct aspect ratio. Ubuntu 6.06 manages it, so it's a noticable omission.
The way users preferences are accessed and presented is good. A lot of thought has gone in to the interface in this regard. Much more intuitive (daft things like clicking 'personalise' instead of 'properties').
If the finished article gets rid of the networking problems and 3d parties sort out their drivers, it looks like I will be buying into Vista.
1) I can't get a route to the internet. My ageing DLink PCI NIC is apparently fully supported, but it refuses to pick up its config by DHCP.
2) My built-in NIC (nForce 4, never used) also doesn't work, the driver fails to install correctly.
3) My sound-card (Audigy ex platinum) has drivers, but they also fail to install properly (tried 2 methods).
The Vista interface is quite a slick idea and it is well implemented. A few graphical glitches manifest, but this is a beta, after all!
Responsiveness is not so good. I attribute this to everything being compiled with debug mode on (evidenced by mem usage over 700MB on boot) and with me running from an old 20GB Maxtor on plain ATA100.
I don't like how there seem to be half a dozen different ways into network configuration, and as many different options again to view the current network. Perhaps this just takes some getting used to. The individual options and views make sense on their own, but to have so many seems confusing. Average Joe's are not going to be pleased.
A shame that desktop backgrounds can't be zoomed to fill the screen whilst maintaining correct aspect ratio. Ubuntu 6.06 manages it, so it's a noticable omission.
The way users preferences are accessed and presented is good. A lot of thought has gone in to the interface in this regard. Much more intuitive (daft things like clicking 'personalise' instead of 'properties').
If the finished article gets rid of the networking problems and 3d parties sort out their drivers, it looks like I will be buying into Vista.
Average Joe's are not going to be pleased.
Never mind them, think of all the poor tech support guys! Sod the tech support guys, they get paid for it ;)
Not nearly enough tho'.
heh, anyway, I heard that the biggest gripe from a gamers perspective, is that games don't play well unless you have 2GB of ram. At which point they run great in vista..
And shock horror Starforce games won't work in Vista at all :).
And shock horror Starforce games won't work in Vista at all :).
And shock horror Starforce games won't work in Vista at all :)
I don't use my PC for games, but that brought a huge smile to my face.
And shock horror Starforce games won't work in Vista at all :).
Guess I'm updating to Vista after all!
(ok, I still wont, but you get the point ;P )
I bet you £10 that by the time Vista comes out, games wil actually run better in 1GB than they currently do with XP.
Impressions anyone? I have some...
With regards to Max, DX appears to be unusable and OGL is only a little slower than on XP, using nVidia's v88 drivers.
For the guy with an Audigy Ex, I know it's different but I experimented with drivers for my Audigy Platinum : I wanted the Audio Console, so I installed the XP drivers and low and behold they work pretty well. Plugging in headphones in the front bay caused a BSOD, but everything else appeared to work well. I then installed the Vista drivers and that appeared to cure the BSOD, WITH a usable Audio Console!
Oh, disable UAP. Apparently the audio console won't run with it on (the actual XP drivers still work fine, apparently). Another option for you may be the NGO modded drivers.
Other than that, more or less smooth sailing. Aero is a rediculous hog (so much so that my Athlon64 3ghz, 512MB DDR2, GeForce6600 256MB system crawls to a halt installing Office 2007 AND deleting a file at the same time, for example - Aero off (WinXP style Themes) runs well). Flash Player 8 causes problems (use 9 beta). Configuring the taskbar to auto-hide appears to cause a 60ish second lockup every time I click a link in any explorer window. That's my only real problem. Other problems revolve around old hardware on a test machine I used before nuking my home computer...
With regards to Max, DX appears to be unusable and OGL is only a little slower than on XP, using nVidia's v88 drivers.
For the guy with an Audigy Ex, I know it's different but I experimented with drivers for my Audigy Platinum : I wanted the Audio Console, so I installed the XP drivers and low and behold they work pretty well. Plugging in headphones in the front bay caused a BSOD, but everything else appeared to work well. I then installed the Vista drivers and that appeared to cure the BSOD, WITH a usable Audio Console!
Oh, disable UAP. Apparently the audio console won't run with it on (the actual XP drivers still work fine, apparently). Another option for you may be the NGO modded drivers.
Other than that, more or less smooth sailing. Aero is a rediculous hog (so much so that my Athlon64 3ghz, 512MB DDR2, GeForce6600 256MB system crawls to a halt installing Office 2007 AND deleting a file at the same time, for example - Aero off (WinXP style Themes) runs well). Flash Player 8 causes problems (use 9 beta). Configuring the taskbar to auto-hide appears to cause a 60ish second lockup every time I click a link in any explorer window. That's my only real problem. Other problems revolve around old hardware on a test machine I used before nuking my home computer...
Vista is pure evil *period* ;)