Vista Beta 2 available for free public d/l!
Vista Beta 2 available for free public d/l!
Author
Discussion

aldi

Original Poster:

9,292 posts

267 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
quotequote all
www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx

You get your own key and everything!

xiphias

5,889 posts

257 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
quotequote all
Kerching! Been using the non public with a borrowed key....it took me 3 restore attempts to get all my hardware installed as quite often fixing one thing broke something else

neil_cardiff

17,113 posts

294 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
quotequote all
Ah,

all very well, but it's still not quite worknig right, and many drivers are still missing - so it means that most likely that the most important thing you need is broken.

Still nice to see what they are up to though.

Cue lots of wailing about MS being crap at OS and nothing working...

Calm down dear, its a Beta...

The Dude

6,546 posts

277 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
quotequote all
Windows + Beta = don't touch even with a very long bargepole....

neil_cardiff

17,113 posts

294 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
quotequote all
Why?

If you know what you are doing and the limitations (i.e. RTFM) of the beta then its a very useful exercise.

Too many people treat it as "ooh free new OS to play with" rather than "Hmm, where is MS taking us in the next 10 years"

UncleDave

7,155 posts

261 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
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Think i'd better try this

nick heppinstall

9,090 posts

310 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
quotequote all
Mmmm. Signed up. Went through the logon procedure. Just hangs on download page. If they have not got bandwidth or servers to cope with demand then why bother. Dicks.

mattley

3,039 posts

252 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
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In all fairness no one on the planet was ever going to have enough bandwidth for this one.

__lee__

7,520 posts

273 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
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I have had a legal copy which I have tried to run on my 2.8ghz P4 with 1 gig of ddr2 ram.

It has serious problems with resources on my machine, which I was disappointed to find. I think this must be a driver/code problem as I ran vista 1 on the same machine with no problems.

On my company laptop, Vista 1 is fine and I am very impressed considering it was only a beta.

xiphias

5,889 posts

257 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
quotequote all
I've got 2gig, and it uses 24% after having just loaded.

neil_cardiff

17,113 posts

294 months

Thursday 8th June 2006
quotequote all
mattley said:
In all fairness no one on the planet was ever going to have enough bandwidth for this one.


Exactly

MS have pretty much THE biggest pipes in and out of their sites and servers - but then again, did you really expect that you'd get a chance on the first day?

IIRC they something like a 6Gb feed to the internet or something in the US...

Edited by neil_cardiff on Thursday 8th June 20:37

Zad

13,020 posts

266 months

Friday 9th June 2006
quotequote all
neil_cardiff said:


IIRC they something like a 6Gb feed to the internet or something in the US...



They use Akamai distributed cache servers for big things like this. Last I heard, Akamai could deliver well over 100Gb so it's probably well in excess of that now.

Polarbert

17,936 posts

261 months

Friday 9th June 2006
quotequote all
xiphias said:
I've got 2gig, and it uses 24% after having just loaded.





Does anyone have a screenshot of what it looks like? As The Dude said, I really can't be arsed with beta.

Polarbert

17,936 posts

261 months

Friday 9th June 2006
quotequote all
Zad said:
neil_cardiff said:


IIRC they something like a 6Gb feed to the internet or something in the US...



They use Akamai distributed cache servers for big things like this. Last I heard, Akamai could deliver well over 100Gb so it's probably well in excess of that now.




Are you f**king joking? Thats like a d/l speed of 1gb/sec? F U C K I N G H E L L

robdickinson

31,343 posts

284 months

Friday 9th June 2006
quotequote all
The dowlnoad is what 3gb? Multiply that by just about everyone with an internet connection who's remotly intrested in vista. I'd guess a huge % of the next few days bandwidth will be this. Why no BT distribution I dont know.

Neilus

908 posts

312 months

Friday 9th June 2006
quotequote all
nick heppinstall said:
Mmmm. Signed up. Went through the logon procedure. Just hangs on download page. If they have not got bandwidth or servers to cope with demand then why bother. Dicks.


Downloaded it last night; no problems. Took about 90 minutes though.

Neil.

m12_nathan

5,138 posts

289 months

Friday 9th June 2006
quotequote all
Polarbert said:
xiphias said:
I've got 2gig, and it uses 24% after having just loaded.





Does anyone have a screenshot of what it looks like? As The Dude said, I really can't be arsed with beta.


shadytree

8,291 posts

279 months

Friday 9th June 2006
quotequote all
Sorry, a long and stupid question, but what's the major differences between Windows and Vista ? and is it worth changing? What's the advantages?

xiphias

5,889 posts

257 months

Friday 9th June 2006
quotequote all
www.microsoft.com/presspass/newsroom/winxp/VistaBeta1FS.mspx

Doesn't seem a lot to me in four years. Maybe they've made it super secure and rock stable, but as it's still a beta I can't tell! At the moment half my xp apps won't boot on it. Just have to wait I suppose...

CommanderJameson

22,096 posts

256 months

Friday 9th June 2006
quotequote all
shadytree said:
Sorry, a long and stupid question, but what's the major differences between Windows and Vista ? and is it worth changing? What's the advantages?

New interface - mucho rearrango. IE7 - different and allegedly better. The security model has changed - it now asks for permission when things install and need to touch system stuff. This is annoying - I was asked three times whether a web page could run a plugin. It's much harder to get at system files now. The other thing you'll see is that compatibility with the old Documents and Settings hierarchy has been achieved by using things called "junction points", which are what shortcuts always should have been. For UNIX people, they're similar in function to symbolic links.

More games - Freecell has finally had a spruce up!

Hardware support is still a little iffy; it didn't detect my bog-standard Audigy 2 soundcard and Netgear Wireless NIC. Creative have Vista drivers for the former and the XP drivers for the latter work fine.

The beta 2 is a resource hog compared to XP - don't even think of installing on a box with less than 1GB of RAM, and it needs about 15GB-ish disk space to install.

If you're not happy running software that might quite unexpectedly eat all your data and leave your computer in an unusable state, running the beta is probably unwise.