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Windows Vista Beta 2 Available for Download 444

Posted by samzenpus 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."
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Windows Vista Beta 2 Available for Download More

Windows Vista Beta 2 Available for Download

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  • Ooops, Antitrust (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ckwop ( 707653 ) * on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:11AM (#15493543) Homepage

    Okay, go to the "resource centre link", provided here [microsoft.com]here 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

    • 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.

      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:4, Insightful)

        by Threni ( 635302 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:40AM (#15493680)
        > Of course they're trying to hold onto their monopoly, it's what dying companies that fail to
        > innovate do.

        You're confusing fantasy with reality, I'm afraid. You mean it's what the world's most successful companies do.

        • Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:5, Interesting)

          by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @09:29AM (#15493954)
          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.

    • Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:18AM (#15493584) Homepage
      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

    • Software Freedom (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bios_Hakr ( 68586 )
      As an individual, you have the freedom to decide what you put on your website. Aside from a few taboo subjects, you have the freedom to do pretty much whatever you want.

      Why should MS be different?

      Sure, you can point at artificial market constraints as a reason MS should play nice. But, at the end of the day, you either support freedom in the software marketplace, or you don't.

      If you support free software (and individual freedoms), you have to believe that MS should be allowed to publish *their* documentat

      • Re:Software Freedom (Score:4, Interesting)

        by mrchaotica ( 681592 ) * on Thursday June 08, 2006 @10:01AM (#15494133)
        As an individual, you have the freedom to decide what you put on your website.

        As a monopoly convicted of illegal anti-competitive business practices, the rules change!

        If you support free software (and individual freedoms), you have to believe that MS should be allowed to publish *their* documentation in whatever format they choose.

        No you don't. Microsoft should be forced to publish documentation in unencumbered formats, after what it's done. Maybe if it didn't have a history of abusing its monopoly to force its formats on people, it'd be different.

        Remember, by providing documentation in their own format, they are not removing your choice.

        Yeah they are! They're removing your choice to read their documentation without using their software!

        • Re:Software Freedom (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Khuffie ( 818093 )
          They're removing your choice to read their documentation without using their software!

          The documentation is for their software. And that particular software (Vista) the documentation is for can read the file format fine without any extra downloads. And there's a .doc format which every program and his grandma can read.

      • Mod Parent (-1, Missed the Boat)

        Sure, you can point at artificial market constraints as a reason MS should play nice. But, at the end of the day, you either support freedom in the software marketplace, or you don't.

        I support software freedom. As such, I must actively oppose companies who violate our laws and in doing so, actively attempt to prevent software freedom.

        If you support free software (and individual freedoms), you have to believe that MS should be allowed to publish *their* documentation

    • Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:3, Interesting)

      by cliffski ( 65094 )
      Good. PDFs suck. My system is 99% stable, the only two things that lock it and grind it to a halt are Battlefield 2 crashes and opening a sodding PDF file. The sooner that cludgy file format dies the better.
      Im sick of having to read stuff formatted for print on a computer screen.
    • you expect them to post a pdf? how bout a one of those "get adobe acrobat here" buttons too? maybe their videos should be in quicktime too. of course microsoft is going to push their formats. nothing new.

    • The motivation of corporations (Score:4, Informative)

      by zoeblade ( 600058 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:29AM (#15493635) Homepage

      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.

      • That's pretty much what they are: People without any kind of moral.

        Morals are something we have, because we feel remorse for doing something "bad". We have morals, because our conscience is nagging when we have something to blame on ourselves that we did wrong. It enables us to function in groups.

        Corps don't have that kind of mental safeguard against going postal. Corporations don't act by themselves, they use their employees to act for them. Those are, by definition, human beings who WOULD have a conscienc

    • Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:3, Insightful)

      by zidohl ( 976382 )
      After Adobe threatened MS with a lawsuit [slashdot.org] for wanting to allow PDF writing for free in Office 2007 i can see why they'd rather use their own format. Essentially, they weren't pushing their own format, they were going to provide PDF support as well as the XPS format, but Adobe it seems will be suing [eweek.com] because they're not charging for the ability to convert to PDF format.

      • Re:Ooops, Antitrust (Score:3, Insightful)

        by elrous0 ( 869638 ) *
        No kidding. If anyone thinks for a second that MS is going to promote Adobe after Adobe threatened to sue them and forced pdf out of Office, they must be on some pretty powerful hallucinogens. I'm not exactly a big MS fan (they still owe me for the havoc that Frontpage wrecked on my entire website directory in 1999), but even I can't blame them for this.

        -Eric

        • I read yesterday though that they were trying to strike a deal with Adobe to include Adobe Flash player, Acrobat (viewer), and one other Adobe product by default in Vista in exchange for the Adobe allowing MS to include a "print to PDF" function as a default in Office (and Vista--as a print driver). Technically, MS is in the right with the whole allowing people to save to PDF since its an open format and a feature that their customers want... But then how could Adobe sell their PDF print driver (I forget th
    • Yes, but does it run Linux? ;)
    • 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.

      Well if there is one example of 'crime does pay well' i would say it is Microsoft, why would they change? It works!

    • heroine addict (Score:3, Funny)

      by blueZ3 ( 744446 )
      Can't get enough Laura Croft?

    • iBias? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by brunes69 ( 86786 ) <`gro.daetsriek' `ta' `todhsals'> on Thursday June 08, 2006 @10:49AM (#15494497)

      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.

      Not to be a pro-MS shill, but supporting PDF over XPS is kind of like appls vs. apples. XPS is a totally open standard, its XML based. SUre, it's "controlled" by Microsoft, but PDF is "controlled" by Adobe. One is really no better than the other. PDF is just more popular right now.

  • I hope it works on my ibook or mini - Hope it is not like other MS products.

  • Upgrade My WinXP Machine? Why? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by eldavojohn ( 898314 ) * <eldavojohn@noSpAM.gmail.com> on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:12AM (#15493548) Journal
    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 [microsoft.com]" (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 [extremetech.com] ... and I'm not even sure it will run on my current hardware [engadget.com]. Hell, even IBM [neoseeker.com] doesn't seem to want Vista.

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

    • Why run Windows XP ? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I ran Windows 2000 for years, just because I hated Windows XP for the very same reasons. Now I run Windows XP.
      Trust me, you will follow....
    • New games will appear, probably Vista-only, as DirectX won't be released for XP. So it'll be either upgrade or play old games. (Unless the game makers will find a way to avoid OS-dependence).

    • Re:Upgrade My WinXP Machine? Why? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tim C ( 15259 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:26AM (#15493615)
      Hell, even IBM doesn't seem to want Vista.

      What?! Arguably the single largest corporate sponsor of Linux and assorted OSS projects doesn't seem too interested in Vista?

      Say it ain't so!

      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.

      So set the theme to Windows Classic. Sheesh; you make it sound like Aero Glass is the only option...

    • 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...

      • I was forced to upgrade to XP because my video editing software forced me for no real reason other than their "partnetship" with microsoft.

        Otherwise I would be still emjoying Windows 2000 and it's incredible speed over XP on most hardware.

        When my video editing software supplier tries to force upgrade to Vista I will be making the jump to Apple.

    • Honestly, the only reason I'm interested in Vista is the Expose-like feature. I use a mac at school and Expose makes working just a little less frustrating.
    • What makes you think you're part of the targeted audience?
      Hint: the masses do like glass faces and real marble and don't care about the inner workings of an operating system.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I got to play with this a couple weeks of go, and I think MS is doing alot better than expected. Earlier reviews of vista and longhorn before that rightly criticized it for some really bad issues but they're very cleaned up now, and given them more than six months more to complete it I think they can ship something great out of this. I don't say it will end up changing the dynamics of a desktop in competition with linux as they are now very distinct systems with their own niches, as vista is just more of th

  • Point? (Score:2, Informative)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 )
    Why would anyone outside of ISVs download this? So for the cost of re-imaging my system I get to test an unstable, feature incomplete OS that is likely to further the bane of human existance. Not only does the install expire but I then have to pay full price for a legit copy at the end.

    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... /me hopes Vista never materializes and/or flops big.

    Tom

    • Re:Point? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pintomp3 ( 882811 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:19AM (#15493590)
      if you have to support windows boxes, you will probably have to support vista some day. might as well get a headstart and get your hands dirty (best way to learn) even if you don't plan on rolling it out for a long time (a long time after release).

    • Re:Point? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Tumbarumba ( 74816 )

      Why would anyone outside of ISVs download this? So for the cost of re-imaging my system I get to test an unstable, feature incomplete OS that is likely to further the bane of human existance. Not only does the install expire but I then have to pay full price for a legit copy at the end. And for all my bug reports I send in I get ???

      You get:

      • An opportuninty to test any software you have developed for compatibility with the updated platform
      • The thrill of being on the bleeding edge, and to play with somet
    • cost of re-imaging my system

      Why would you do that for ANY beta OS? It is beta after all. So unless you want to install on some spare PC you don't use, just do like everyone else and toss it on a VM. Never a good idea to replace an existing OS which you rely on for your work with a beta no matter who makes the OS. Try it out yes, but don't throw away an existing and reliable OS you can depend on so you can try one you hope that works. There is plenty of free VM software out there (heck even from MS n
    • Nobody's forcing you to download it, install it, run it, send in bug reports or buy it when it's released.

      I sure as hell know I'm not going to use Vista any time soon, because I simply don't need it. It may look fancier and have some k3wl new stuff, but I don't need any of it.
    • I own a PC shop and 99% of the machines that come in are running some variation of Windows, mostly XP. So this gives me a nice head start in getting to know the software, even if it is beta. The only Linux machine in the shop right now is the one I'm typing this on, actually. I service Windows machines and manage Windows based networks for a living. I run Linux on all my personal machines. Both have their ups and downs. I'm always very helpful with a customer wants to try out this new "Linucks" thing,
    • Well, I'm about to start a new job in a month for a software company that is focusing very heavily on porting their products to Windows Vista, and I figure any head-start I can get in learning the new OS will be of huge benefit to me in the new job.

  • direct download links (Score:5, Informative)

    by pintomp3 ( 882811 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:13AM (#15493556)
    getting the serial # is easy enough, but the download page has been overloaded. here are links for direct download of the english iso

    Windows Vista 32bit - English
    http://download.windowsvista.com/dl/preview/beta2/ en/x86/iso/vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_ x86fre_client-LB2CFRE_EN_DVD.iso [windowsvista.com]

    Windows Vista 64bit - English
    http://download.windowsvista.com/dl/preview/beta2/ en/x64/iso/vista_5384.4.060518-1455_winmain_beta2_ x64fre_client-LB2CxFRE_EN_DVD.iso [windowsvista.com]

    they should have had a torrent option.

  • thanks for the update (Score:5, Funny)

    by observer7 ( 753034 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:17AM (#15493579) Homepage
    ill download my antivirus updates ...maybe if this windows is in the wild it will be detected before i get it

  • Get Your Crack Right Here!!! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hey kid! You wanna taste the new Vista? Come over here and try some sweet Vista. Don't worry about expirations, vendor lock in, security, assimilation or anything else. I'll take care of all of it for you.

    Come on, kid. You know you want a taste. Come try this new Vista Beta. It's free! And I know how much you like free...

  • Can't log in using Konqueror (Score:3, Funny)

    by truedfx ( 802492 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:23AM (#15493604)
    Shame on you, such a big corporation not spending a little bit of time on making your site interoperable. :)
    • In fairness, it *does* work using Firefox. So they're doing better than usual. Contrast to Windows Live Safety Centre (http://safety.live.com) which breaks if you even try to do anything in firefox (let alone anything else).

      --
      Craig Ringer

  • They're 2 days late. (Score:5, Funny)

    by exit3219 ( 946049 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @08:38AM (#15493666) Homepage
    Should've released it on 6/6/6.
  • ...is where was the photograph taken that's shown on the Vista page at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/ [microsoft.com]?
    • where was the photograph taken that's shown on the Vista page

      Forget about it mate she's too smug for you.

    • At a guess I'd say it's taken from the Barrow Downs above Bree looking towards Weathertop. Although that stretch of water could be the River Anduin near Cair Andros, which makes that mountain at the back right Mount Doom. Whatever, if you view just the background the image without the site search input field, you can just about make out nine black dots flying high in the sky.

    • That's Mt Hood off in the distance with the Columbia river down below. So it looks like it was taken from one of the bluffs along the gorge on the Washington side of the river.
      My best guess anyway.
  • For all my constant bitching about how much I despise Microsoft and hate having to reimage my computer every 6 months because of bit rot, you better bet i signed up for this as fast as my little fingers could type. Yeah, I feel dirty, but assuming my computers will support it and I can actually get the iso, I'll be attempting to install Vista this evening.
  • on Virtual PC on a G5 quad with masses of memory, if at all?

  • Out of Curiosity (Score:5, Informative)

    by ghost of perception ( 974605 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @09:05AM (#15493823)
    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.

    • Re:Out of Curiosity (Score:3, Informative)

      by omicronish ( 750174 )

      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

    • Duel booting is fine and good man, but here in Nebraska most of our duels involve trashy girls, broken beer bottles and crushed sinus cavities.

      If you don't want your OS booting to end up like that, I'd recommend dual booting.

      You'll avoid much hassle that way, because then you can specify which OS you'd like booted, as opposed to them dueling it out. :)

  • My thoughts... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Critical_ ( 25211 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @09:14AM (#15493873) Homepage
    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

  • Good! (Score:2, Informative)

    by Toreo asesino ( 951231 )
    Slashdotters, we should be pleased this shinny new Windows is coming to the masses. I have tried it already, and uninstalled it already - it being unusable as it is in a Virtual Machine.

    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 go
  • Broadband Internet connection (highly recommended)
    Yes, I would also recommend broadband for a 4.4GB file...

  • We apologize for any inconvenience. (Score:5, Funny)

    by StarWreck ( 695075 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @09:48AM (#15494067) Homepage Journal
    Thank you for your interest in Windows Vista Beta 2.

    We are currently experiencing a high level of demand and cannot process your request at this time.

    Please check back later for availability. We apologize for any inconvenience.
    Microsoft has been slashdotted. Our life-long work has been accomplished.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @12:16PM (#15495227)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Intel Macs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tempfile ( 528337 ) on Thursday June 08, 2006 @01:48PM (#15495964)
    It seems that Vista is going to be a decent piece of software, if even on Slashdot you can read people make positive comments. As I'm probably going to buy a Macbook, I'm really interested whether Vista is going to run on that. Has anybody tried?

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