Windows Vista Beta 2 Available for Download 444
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."
Point? (Score:2, Informative)
And for all my bug reports I send in I get ???
At least when you beta test an OSS OS you then get rewarded with a stable OS that you can freely install as you choose...
Tom
direct download links (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:2, Informative)
And you find this surprising? Here's another newsflash, try watching videos on the MSNBC website without running Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows. Of course they're trying to hold onto their monopoly, it's what dying companies that fail to innovate do.
Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:1, Informative)
How many printers do you know that ship today or will be out within a year allow you to send a raw PDF file to it and have it print as is without any kind of client spooling and image degradation? XPS lets you do that.
The motivation of corporations (Score:4, Informative)
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... Is it a rule that all big companies go the way of AT&T eventually?
Quite possibly. The documentary The Corporation [imdb.com] pointed out how such corporations, while legally people in some respects, would be more like psychopaths [abstractdynamics.org] than any other kind of people, as they do whatever they can get away with on their quest for more profit, showing a complete disregard for morals and the law.
If it's cheaper to break the law and pay a fine than it is to obey the law and profit less, they'll break it.
Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:5, Informative)
It's much faster than Adobe Reader at opening a PDF file and being a self-executable, requires no installation
Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:5, Informative)
Err, just about all decent printers? Support for Postscript Level 3 basically implies support for printing PDFs.
Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Out of Curiosity (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Good! (Score:2, Informative)
My critique of Vista thus far is summarised as such:
-Vista is furthers the very Microsoft-based philosophy that it knows how to run your machine better than you do - a good thing for average users; a bad thing for geeks.
-Security has been improved & tightened (better firewall, more built-in protection); more or less a good thing for everyone, even if the more technical people may tweak this.
-Improved kernel; a good thing for everyone too, but maybe once it's stable.
-Very pretty graphics. Good for some people; irrelevant for people with slower machines, and damned frustrating for geeks.
Overall, the masses win in most cases and the geeks have very little to benefit from Vista.
The things that I noticed perhaps the most however, are the minor unsung improvements to how user-actions flow together just better; a bit like the small but noticeable improvements WinXP made over Win2k. For instance, the setup process - I must've made about 5 mouse clicks in total; the wizard is simultaneously even more slicker and patronising than ever - good for users, bad for geeks.
Anyway, I very much doubt I'll be upgrading myself as I can handle my own machine perfectly well on my own, but assuming Microsoft can pull it off, I say this is a positive thing for the majority of computer users that, frankly, want Microsoft to take as much care of their machines as possible. The more Windows can take care of a machine; the less irritating requests I'll get to "fix my bloody computer please!"
Works Fine Here (Score:3, Informative)
I have Windows XP, Vista Beta 2, and Gentoo Linux all booting on the same machine, but I've followed the generally safe practice of keeping XP on the first partition of the first drive, and having GRUB in the MBR. Once you install Vista alongside an already set-up XP and Linux dual-boot, it only modifies the boot manager Windows uses. I've successfully removed Vista just fine w/o having to mess with the changes it made to the boot manager, so the only inconvenience I have (Until I edit the config for the bootloader) is that when I tell GRUB to boot my WinXP partition, it loads the MS boot manager and I have to select Previous Windows Installation or some such since it defaults to the Vista that's not there anymore.
Not something for novices, probably, but it works just fine.
P.S. -- The reason I say the Vista that's not there anymore is because I'm in the process of trying to download the public release. Servers are so swamped right now I doubt I'll get it anytime today, which is why I'm taking the opportunity to freshen my Gentoo whilst at work. :(
Re:Out of Curiosity (Score:3, Informative)
First of all, if there's anything you dislike about Vista, complain here [microsoft.com]. It's a beta release, so there's still time to fix issues. They also have newsgroups [microsoft.com]. Device issues, software installs, UI issues, non-working games, etc.; they're all good issues to point out.
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.
One of the new features I like is quick category searching via the column headers. I'm doing this from memory, but if you click on the button next to File Type, for example, you can quickly cull the current view down to all JPEGs and PNGs.
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.
Vista comes with a firewall and antispyware (Windows Defender). They're both in the control panel, and at least the firewall is quite configurable. I believe outbound blocking is off by default, but can be enabled. I haven't used Windows Defender to judge its usefulness.
Re:No it doesn't (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, they can keep xps, it looks like a decent enough format. Just be sure to publish the spec!
Specs are available here [microsoft.com]. It includes the XPS spec itself, which describes the format of the XML files to render pages, and the packaging specs, which describes how those XML files, resources (images, fonts) are packaged together. Office 2007 uses the same packaging specs, which is really just a zip file with certain XML files describing how stuff is connected. A nice side effect is that to generate an XPS document you simply need to output XML and resources, and zip everything up.
German DL links (Score:1, Informative)
http://download.windowsvista.com/dl/preview/beta2
64bit:
http://download.windowsvista.com/dl/preview/beta2
Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:3, Informative)
Of course Microsoft want to to, and personally I don't think Adobe have a leg to stand on in complaining about it. The only worry with Microsoft as always is that "their" PDF won't be quite compatible with everyone elses.
At this point they have no reason to make their PDF incompatible since Microsoft doesn't make a PDF viewer. Incompatible PDFs would simply make them look bad. Plus they have their XPS format [microsoft.com]; thus it wouldn't make sense for them to expend resources on making a PDF viewer and extending PDF.
Re:Works Fine Here (Score:2, Informative)
Took the following steps (starting from a while back, but to give an idea of progression):
1a. Zero both drives
1b. Install Gentoo Linux
2a. Install Windows XP Professional
2b. Restore GRUB MBR from GRUB command line using a GRUB boot disk I had for other purposes
2c. Add XP Professional to GRUB boot list
3a. Install Vista, starting install from XP
3b. Restore GRUB MBR using aforementioned method
3c. I can now boot Gentoo straight from GRUB, and by using my old Windows XP entry in GRUB (now renamed) I can chainload the new bootloader which allows me to choose between the Legacy Windows System (read: XP) and Vista.
Re:Upgrade My WinXP Machine? Why? (Score:2, Informative)
FYI, even if you set it to "classic mode" in Vista, it still uses well over 500MB of RAM. Apparently "classic" does not include "classic" system requirements.
To answer your question... (Score:3, Informative)
My best guess anyway.
Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:3, Informative)
Checksums for Vista Beta (MD5 SHA1 MD5SUM SHA1SUM) (Score:1, Informative)
http://download.windowsvista.com/dl/preview/beta2
$ sha1sum.exe vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_x86fre_cli
2404153a60d81103861b876878893222a5529d3a *vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_x86fre_cl
$ md5sum.exe vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_x86fre_cli
0e733ab1a8e8ff9a8684fd3639332773 *vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_x86fre_cl
File size 3355598848 bytes.
Re:Checksums for Vista Beta (MD5 SHA1 MD5SUM SHA1S (Score:1, Informative)
2404153a60d81103861b876878893222a5529d3a