Windows Vista - Not So Bad?

Shantyman writes "ZDNet has a counterpoint to the negative impressions of Vista's Beta 2 going around. Entitled Vista Beta 2, up close and personal, Ed Bott writes: 'I've spent the last three months running beta versions of Windows Vista on the PCs I use for everyday work. February and March were exasperating. April's release was noticeably better, and the Beta 2 preview - Build 5381, released to testers in early May - has been running flawlessly on my notebook for nearly three weeks.'"

Comments

Microsoft eating their own dogfood?

[yagu]

From the very first paragraph of the article:

Up in Redmond, Microsoft developers proudly talk of dogfooding the software they write. Running beta software is the only way to learn what works and what doesn't. A copy of Windows Vista running on a test machine in the corner isn't likely to get a serious workout. To find the pain points -- another popular Microsoft expression -- you have to run that beta code on the machine you use every day.

Wasn't there a slashdot reference to an article in the last week where Microsoft "was considering" removing admin access from their employees? That doesn't sound like "eating their own dogfood". As long as they're all running Windows with the highest access levels (admin), they're potentially missing serious security problems.

Since Lowest User Access (LUA) is a huge issue around tightening Windows security, running Vista within Microsoft means little around testing security. And, unless they're shipping Vista with defaults of non-admin user accounts, the beta testing world isn't likely to bang on that code hard enough.

It's not clear from the article, nor do I know enough about the Vista beta (not about to try it on any of my machines...) whether the LUA concept is in play. Any beta testers out there care to weigh in?

Vista works

[Anonymous Coward]

Me and some of my coworkers have been running vista build 5308 and I just installed build 5381 on those machines and they have been running very well. The install was improved and the interface is running a lot smoother and the new ati beta drivers are working good too. It's also running directx 10 now compared to 9L in the last build. We also have Office 2007 Beta 2 running on it and that too is working very well, We have both machines on a 2003 active directory network with exchange. The UAC does get annoying when it keeps asking you if your sure you want to do things, but a quick skim through the local security policy solved that :-) All in all I'd say Beta 2 has improved greatly over the past few releases. The memory usage at least is way down. It was using about 750mbs on our machines. I am upset that an Athlon X2 4200, with 4 gigs of ddr-400, a sata2 80 gig drive, and an atix1300 with 265mb on the card only gets a 3 out of 5 on the stupid rating system. Especially when everything works smooth, including the 3d page flip. I do feel that the "minimum requirements" that microsoft posted are of course a joke but that's nothing new.