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Windows Vista Beta 2 Available for Download

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.

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."

5 of 444 comments (clear)

  1. Ooops, Antitrust by Ckwop · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Okay, go to the "resource centre link", provided herehere for your convenience. What do you notice? I'll give a hint:

    Download the Windows Vista Product Guide

    Available in Microsoft Word format (60 MB) or the new Windows Vista XPS document format (12 MB) . (emph mine)

    Where the hell is the PDF? Aside from the fact that this is really fucking annoying it has some really worrying implications. They're trying to boot out the PDF format, which is nice, open and ubiquitous with their own format - and they're using their monopoly on the desktop operating system market to achieve this.

    Let me be the first to call "Antitrust. Thanks for playing Microsoft! Please give the EU another 600 million euros.

    For me, this little bit of text says it all. There's no PDF, they're pushing their own format that they know nobody uses. This shows that even after multiple multi-million dollar settlements and huge fines from the EU the company has not changed one bit. They seem to be acting much like a heroine addict, in that they're moving from one crime to the next, getting bigger and bigger fines but no matter how much you fine the company it is still pathologically anti-competitive.

    I do have to say that the longer Microsoft remains on this path, and refuses to comply with the law, the more likely that it will meet it's end equally as sticky as the heroine addict. Is it a rule that all big companies go the way of AT&T eventually?

    Simon

    1. Re:Ooops, Antitrust by tomstdenis · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Technically though it's their website and they can put whatever lame duck format on their they want. I don't think they'll get rid of PDF. Look at WMF it's technically a replacement for Postscript yet people still use that.

      The XPS format will either get opened up or nobody but MSFT websites will use it. Especially since Vista will still run Adobe...

      What you should be questioning is why XPS exists at all. PDF seems to do the job of portable document format just fine being that it renders [or can be rendered] pitch perfect anywhere. Unlike say Word which is a just a crime against professionalism...

      Tom

      --
      Someday, I'll have a real sig.
    2. Re:Ooops, Antitrust by timeOday · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Obviously you can't be a monopoly without being the most successful company in your field, and after establishing a monopoly you can hardly fail to be successful. A company would be foolish not to desire monopoly, which is exactly why the public would be foolish not to actively thwart them. Why, if you're not careful, you could get a company so "successful" their key divisions make 85% profit margins year after year without releasing a new major product for 5 years, which consistently "earns" billions of dollars they won't even return to their own shareholders. Which is fab if you happen to be them, but a drain on the economy as a whole.

  2. Upgrade My WinXP Machine? Why? by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I am a simple man.

    I don't want an operating system with bells & whistles. I don't want an operating system that looks like it has a glass face or real marble or the most incredible anti-aliased font you've ever seen. What I want is an operating system that works and works efficiently.

    There's no reason to preach to the choir, I have many machines (most of them Linux) that dual boot to many operating systems but you'll always need Windows because it's kind of the 'industry standard' for some people.

    But when I look for an operating system the words 'form','function','marriage' & 'perfect' come to mind but not necessarily in that order. What I mean is, there's a balance I seek such that my hardware isn't stressed just to open a text editor yet the design is simple & friendly to the eye.

    I run Windows XP professional & it works. It works well, which is surprising considering my history with the Windows operating system. It can be cut down to a pretty bare point of functionality and I like it.

    So, Mr. Gates, why should I upgrade to Vista? Your "feature list" (the same damn thing I've been seeing for the last year) doesn't entice me at all. In fact, it scares me. You know what else scares me? It might not run the games I currently play ... and I'm not even sure it will run on my current hardware. Hell, even IBM doesn't seem to want Vista.

    Tons of cash for a bloated operating system? No thanks. I'll settle for Windows XP Professional.

    --
    My work here is dung.
  3. My thoughts... by Critical_ · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I was writing a blog entry but figured I'd post it here.

    Although the latest Beta 2 detected all of my hardware except my smartcard reader, I'm not impressed. There are some issues with 802.1x authentication which is quite a large hindrance (especially for corporate customers). Mainly, it does not work in my WPA2-Enterprise (WPA2 + AES + RADIUS) wireless network running at my home. Vista would send the proper authentication information and the Microsoft IAS RADIUS server (running on Win2k3) would grant access (confirmed via logs) but Vista would not grab an IP address. Statically setting an IP also failed to provide network access. I had to pull out an old WEP access point and finally Vista worked wirelessly. Due to WEP's insecurity, I have resorted to having to use the built in gigabit ethernet. Albeit that most of the public doesn't have as an elaborate of a set up at home, but I'm surprised that this is borked in Beta 2.

    USB2 is horribly slow. I connected a USB2 memory stick to copy some files off the system when wireless wasn't working. The new Vista file copy progress dialog displays transfer rate. The fastest it ever got was about 300KB/s! Can you imagine waiting almost 10 minutes to transfer 150 megs locally? I almost went nuts. Again, I acknowledge this is beta software, but is it that hard to get USB Mass Storage drivers to work properly?

    The Aero Glass interface isn't very responsive. Since Windows 95, the mouse pointer in Windows has never been afflicted by pauses when moving the pointer. I'm sure all of us remember these hiccupy movements of the pointer in X Windows in Linux distributions a few years ago, but the Linux community largely solved these problems. I was very surprised when I saw this behavior in Vista Beta 2. I was running the Vista nVidia drivers. I also noticed the screen compositing process pegging the CPU usage to about 30-40% and sometimes it would completely pause for a few seconds before updating the desktop and its windows. I tried XGL on this same system and never dealt with any of the problems. Maybe my Direct X 9-enabled, 128 meg nVidia Quadro FX Go video card may be 2 years old, I'm surprised with the lack of performance. Can Microsoft streamline and optimize this in time for a release? I hope so otherwise I'll be running the basic interface if I ever upgrade.

    Vista Beta 2 is a resource hog. A full install with Office 2007 took nearly 14 gigs of hard drive space. After boot up, Windows commit charge was averageing nearly 750-800megs of RAM on my laptop equipped with 2gigs of RAM. Opening up Firefox with a few tabs, MSN messenger, and playing a DivX AVI in Windows Media Player 11 pushed up the usage to nearly 1.3gigs of RAM. I know any unused RAM is wasted RAM but when a basic Windows hogs that much, it shows that power users will easily have to push 4gigs of RAM if they intend to run Photoshop or a few instances of Office applications.

    The other annoyance is the new non-admin user model. It is completely broken and illogical. Inevitably, those people that get Vista Beta 2 working on their hardware will complain about constantly being bothered to elevate privileges. The end result will either be people disabling the new protection scheme or learning to click without reading-both scenarios are disastrous and will render this protection useless.

    As it stands, Microsoft needs to revamp the model. I want a Control Panel applet that will let me choose the level of incisiveness. Here is my proposal:

    1. Off - If I'm logged in as an Administrator, then it will work as current Windows machines.

    2. Default - The current default settings as shipped in Vista Beta 2. The user would be hand held even while in his/her profile (aka home) directory. Deleting, editing and installing any files would all require the annoying pop-up dialog confirming action.

    3. Limited Power User - Following the Linux model as shown in Red Hat of yesteryear, Ubuntu and others with a modification or two. All system files, installation of software available to the