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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."
Okay, go to the "resource centre link", provided herehere for your convenience. What do you notice? I'll give a hint:
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
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.
ill download my antivirus updates ...maybe if this windows is in the wild it will be detected before i get it
No thanks. I'll settle for Windows XP Professional.
Well, while I agree with all your points. The thing is: I said exactly the same a few years ago when I was running Windows 2000. I thought I would never upgrade... Yet, now I run Windows XP Professional. Why? Well, XP had one thing I really liked (and is very useful on a multi-user-home-machine: fast user switching. I only "upgraded" to Windows XP in 2005, so I am "late" to Windows XP. I always end up upgrading late, because I think it's better that other people test the damned thing and find the quirks.
For now, I do not see any reason to upgrade to Windows Vista, but we'll talk again in 2008, when WinXP isn't supported anymore. Currently, I am evaluating FreeBSD as a complete replacement (and I like it...) Perhaps in 2008, I'll be running FreeBSD exclusively. If not, then I'll probably will be running Vista. You'll probably end up in the same boat as me: either a free OS or Windows Vista. Espcially when you buy a new machine and can't get a (legal) copy of XP anymore...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Should've released it on 6/6/6.
http://ascending.wordpress.com/
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.
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
... and in the DRM, bind them.