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Windows Vista Beta 2 Available for Download
prostoalex writes "Microsoft Windows Vista Beta 2 is now available for download from Microsoft's official site. If you remember seeing reviews of it already, Microsoft made downloads available to a limited set of customers last month. For PC users that are already running Windows Vista Beta 2, Microsoft put together a list of additional downloads like product guide and feature lists."
getting the serial # is easy enough, but the download page has been overloaded. here are links for direct download of the english iso
/ en/x86/iso/vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_ x86fre_client-LB2CFRE_EN_DVD.iso
/ en/x64/iso/vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_ x64fre_client-LB2CxFRE_EN_DVD.iso
Windows Vista 32bit - English
http://download.windowsvista.com/dl/preview/beta2
Windows Vista 64bit - English
http://download.windowsvista.com/dl/preview/beta2
they should have had a torrent option.
download Foxit PDF Reader http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
It's much faster than Adobe Reader at opening a PDF file and being a self-executable, requires no installation
Err, just about all decent printers? Support for Postscript Level 3 basically implies support for printing PDFs.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
So Microsoft want to make printer manufacturers use their own proprietary protocol rather than Postscript which has been doing this job rather well for the last 20 years?
You also don't seem to know how print spoolers work. They do *not* work for the lowest common denominator, they are pretty much device independent until they hit the driver itself... even Windows uses a display language to describe the page rather than Bitmaps (Unix of course use postscript throughout, so if you print a postscript document on a decent printer no driver is ever involved).
Despite vowing never to touch vista I decided to try the beta just to see if it is as bad as people claim.
It installed nice and quickly (faster than xp in fact) on my P4 2.4Ghz 2GB ram box duel booting with XP MCE 2005 although vista takes about 4 mins to boot up.
I like the new file explorer interface but from the initial feel it seems to be more about the look than the functionality of the desktop. It is also nice to see an inclusion of a calendar utility which I always thought was lacking from previous windows versions.
Compatability wise; it does not detect my soundblaster pro 5.1 card and will not let me install the drivers for it claiming that windows compatability wont allow me to do so. The same is true of ZoneAlarm Pro and Avast! Anti Virus which I find insulting as a technically minder user but I do understand that most people who use MS products need to be saved from the "lets install anything" mentality.
Open Office and Firefox install perfectly but Vista brings an error halfway through installing Thunderbird.
The display manager will not allow me to set my screen resolution to anything other than 800x600 although the option is there for 1024x768 but nothing happens when the setting is applied and even at 800x600 the screen flickers eratically every few mins.
I have not installed the wireless networking yet but without my firewall, anti-spyware and anti-virus products, I'm not sure that I even want to connect the the internet.
My S-video out is disabled on loading the desktop (closing the analog hole?) which makes the media center funtion useless on my current setup and the DRM is making itself known with periodic popups telling me that x has been disabled quoting "Macrovision corporation" in the details.
Media Center mode in my view has a better interface than MCE 2005 however AVI files will not work (or be added for that matter) in media center mode.
I am going to test the beta out over the weekend but I am currently of the mind that it is buggy bloatware and not something I would trust my fles to but I am open minded enough to accept problems under the fact that it is a beta release and is not supposed to be anything near a proper release candidate.