Vista Beta 2 - My eXPerience

[mike998]

I know there's a thread on Vista Beta 2, I just had to start a new one. This is my very unprofessional review of Vista Beta 2...

I signed up and downloaded the .iso, burned it to a DVD and set about installing Vista Beta 2.

My machine is a Dell Inspiron 1150 - P4 2.4, 40 Gig HDD, 512 RAM, Intel type video (very low end).

The install went pretty smoothly. The background was in 16 colours but again, a low end video card. To be expected.

Getting the system up and running wasn't a problem. All the drivers seemed to be installed by default where XP had massive problems and I had to install all the drivers by hand.

Actually running the Desktop. Login time wasn't that bad. Took a little while but I wasn't expecting a screaming system.

My work machine is running IE7 so I was curious to see what IE7 was like in Vista. Not too shabby. Long term, I might just install Firefox, but this is not too bad. Tell it to be paranoid, it's paranoid. But vocal. The whole system is vocal. Pop-ups when installing software - "Program X is trying to do Y - Do you want to allow it to do this?"... YES! I can see the reason why, but this is just annoying. After a while, Joe Sixpack will just start hitting yes and not read the dialog.

Not a bad desktop - My video card wouldn't allow me to use any eye candy, but I am not a fan of eye candy. Nice default theme, though.

Let's fire up Windows Media player. Nothing. Nothing happened. The system seemed to slow down a hell of a lot, but nothing. All of a sudden, my display goes blank on me. Blue screen? Nope - Windows Media player decides it wants to start FULL SCREEN! Yuck!

I tootled around with it for a while and discovered that the system is complaining about a driver not working well. Audio driver - let's go see if there is a beta driver on the manufacturer's website - there is! Download, install, reboot (HUH? Why do I need to reboot? Ubuntu doesn't need to reboot when I am installing wireless drivers.) and after the reboot - Audio is dead. I gave up on audio after that.

I downloaded an icon extraction program and ran it on the system in the hopes of extracting Vista Icons to use if/when I went back to Ubuntu. Seemed to work fine. Slowed the system down a hell of a lot. Way more than it really should have. After it ran I did a "how fast does the desktop feel to me?" type test (just a feeling thing)... Slow. Very slow. I think I would probably need a GIG of memory to get this running so it feels smoothly.
Let's go to the folder with the .ico files. Hmmm... over 6000 files. Well, let's remove all the .icons that are from Windows 3.1, Windows 95 and so on.
That's where I hit a problem. Vista seemed to want to re-render EVERY icon in the folder EVERY time I did ANYTHING in the folder. This caused my laptop to lock up four, maybe five times.

At this point, I decided (after playing wth the system for about 3 maybe 4 hours to wipe it and reinstall Xubuntu. I burned the .ico files first using windows CD burner. Guess what - it burned the files in a wierd format (UDF?). Xubuntu can't read it (I think)... I will have to have another look at that tonight, so I am holding off on that one.

All in all, I think if I had a system with more horsepower, Vista might have behaved a little better and been more responsive. But why do I need a power-house maching just to run my O/S? For the moment, I think I will stick with Xubuntu...

How does anyone else who has tried this feel?

[aktiwers]

I agree with most.

I installed it on Vmware, and it is running good there.

But I also keep getting these popups.. "Do you wanna do this", "is this ok" "are you sure" !!!!! Arggh.. !

It looks very nice, it does, and I can run all the eyecandy here. But then again, it looks very much like a XP that has been skinned, and with some added and removed features.

So fare, I liked XP better than Vista, but its still a beta.
One thing I know for sure though, is it will only be runing through Vmware on my PC, im never gonna install it for dual booting.

It simply isnt good enough. Then I would rather try SuSe or Gentoo.

[Slicedbread]

I installed vista over Dapper (planned on doing it anyway) and from what I have seen it is a waste of bandwidth, it is still buggy- slow and sometime unresponsive. This maybe because I my laptop specs but even XGl didnt introduce and perfomance hits like vista even though it looked much better (and more stable!). The "enhanced" security features were also very annoying every 5 seconds asking me if im sure I wanted to execute this file (like that would stop people from automatically choosing yes anyway). My biggest gripe with it was that it seemed to be XP with a face paint and I would not say that the UI was improved in any way either.

The one thing I did like was that it was the Ultimate version that included the media center functionality, but definitely not worth upgrading/buying. Maybe when they release RC1 it will change but for now its a waste of bandwidth.

I'll stick with XP right now, Dapper= PITA.