Vista public BETA released

[Calum]

my computer's motherboard can only address 768MB of RAM! oh well, looks like i am obsolete. too bad! i suppose i will just have to content myself with running the latest versions of fedora linux with no hardware issues whatsoever for the foreseeable future.

[Aloone_Jonez]

pofnlice,
I agree Windows has been slowly improving but it's also growing rapidly. I'm sure I could tweak Vista so it uses a lot less memory by removing half the pointless shit but I don't see why I should bother. Nowadays the default configreation for most Linux distros are about as bloated as XP but there again XP was released 5 years ago so this is pretty stupid.

[Xeniczone]

ARE YOU KIDDING the minimum requirments are a pentium 3 at 800mhz or a AMD athlon at 800mhz that is BS.
 
My computer is a pentium 4 at 2.2ghz and vista makes it lag around like crazy. I can't even play halo on vista because it wont load the menu.
 

It is very "pretty", The way window's minimize seems to be borrowed from OSX, they like "bounce" around when you minimize them

Microsoft has been stealing from Apple from the beginning when they introduced Windows 95.
 
The search at the top right of every window is stolen from mac.
transparent windows are barrowed from mac.
the bounceing and stuff when minimize/maximize is stolen from mac.
the logo for the menu is stolen from mac.
etc...
 
The only real difference between vista and Mac is Mac OS X can run on a 350mhz cpu and still have room to run msn itunes and photoshop all at the same time. Vista can't even run on a pentium 4 at 2.2ghz correctly.

The fastest thing I got out of this damn vista is downloading it in 30 mins.

[Aloone_Jonez]

Microsoft has been stealing from Apple from the beginning when they introduced Windows 95.

Microsoft actually bought some code of them to use in Windows 3.0, I believe they aquired Paint Brush and Truetype fonts from Apple, I don't know about Windows 95+ though.

[pofnlice]

My point wasn't to say theu would get it right sooner than later...although admittedly it does seem that way. What I should have been more specific about is that it's a BETA. I imagine, since they (MS) are all ready posting stats for system requirements, that would mean they have firmly decided they do not intend to make it compatible for a more broad range of computers, regardless of what hardware is in them. This gets back to the old MES arguements about forced hardware upgrades by MS., just to keep up with thier newest release.

Also, if you've ever read Billy's book, you know this is headed exactly the way he wanted it too. As far as computing power and availability goes anyway.

Bottom line though seems to be the same. They have again created an OS which makes you as the user and customer, totaly dependant on MS for security, upgrades and stability. Regardless of the 3-5 hundred dolloars you all ready gave them, you will still be required to purchase third party programs and office suites and bla bla bla.

[Calum]

Microsoft has been stealing from Apple from the beginning when they introduced Windows 95.

actually they have been ripping apple *and* ibm off since the very first release of microsoft windows (which i think was imaginatively called 1.0)

they even went to court about it i believe, back in those prehistoric days, did they not?

[ReggieMicheals]

Yeah, they went into court, several times actually.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_vs._Microsoft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_litigation_of_Apple_Computer
Guess who won? Microsoft did in this particular inident.

Think if Digital Research was the company IBM selected to create operating systems for their computers instead of Microsoft. Then again, IBM would've been driven belly up with the high prices of CP/M.

[piratePenguin]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notable_litigation_of_Apple_Computer

LMFAO, Apple have done it all
carl sagan, hah, can't believe apple did all that!

[toadlife]

Well I just got it installed on my work PC for the first time on a second hard drive. I didn't have time up until now. The PC is an A64 3000 with 1GB ram and a Geforce 6600 - basically a middle of the road PC right now. It installed much faster than I expected and  it seems fairly responsive. My machine supports the "aero" look and runs it fine.

I have work to do, so I can't play with it much right now. Some stuff is moved around but I didn't have too much trouble finding the control panel thingys I needed.

Oh an BTW, I installed it on a second hard drive, with the first hard drive having a freebsd bootloader, and the vista installer didn't touch the boot loader. I was suprised by that.

[emuelle1]

I don't know if I'm ready to trust it. I put the Office 2007 beta on my laptap. It bogged the system down really bad, so I uninstalled it. It didn't uninstall right. I had Office 2003 and XP installed, and neither will work at all. Office 07 shows up in my add/remove programs list but when I tell it to remove it says there are no files to remove. 2003 and XP won't reinstall correctly at all, at least, not that they're useable. I spent several hours deleting Office registry keys, and barely made a dent in the total. Other than Open Office, I get the feeling that only a reformat of my laptop will fix all the problems the Office 2007 beta caused.

And so, I'm not even about to trust the Vista beta.

I'm working on switching to Linux, which will be slow. Linux doesn't work with wireless very well, but I need wireless support. I'm installing a Solaris DVD on my older laptop to see if it will do what I need. Since everybody but MS and Apple is going open source, it will benefit us all.

[H_TeXMeX_H]

You're right not to trust Vi$ta.

Actually, Linux does have decent wireless support with madwifi and ndiswrapper

I recommend madwifi if it supports your card ... if not then ndiswrapper will work ...

 With ndiswrapper, virtually every miniPCI (builtin), PCI, PCMCIA (Cardbus only) or USB wireless network card works in Linux.

[cymon]

I was rather impressed with Office 2k7 Beta.  The color scheme sucks, but the user interface is pretty damned good.

[emuelle1]

The UI was nice, but it sucked up so much of my system I couldn't get anything else done.

I'll have to check in to madwifi. I got ndiswrapper to recognize my card, but for some reason my system would not see wlan0.

[toadlife]

I must say it's pretty slick. UAC works very well. It makes running as an administrator much safer and running as a limited user much easier. Also In domain enviroments it seems to have shed an annoying bug from XP where software deployment policies would take two reboots to take effect.

The machines I've ran it on are my dual core beast at home and my desktop PC at work. I don't think the system requirements are really that bad. Even on my machine at work, it runs very smootly and it's only a $1000.00 machine. Any middle of the road computer bought right now should be able to run Vista just fine when it gets released.

One thing I noticed is that Windows update will no longer work through the web browser. There is a control panel applet called "Windows Update" in which you do all of your updating tasks. If you try to go to update.microsoft.com, it will tell you to go to the control panel to do your updates.

[Aloone_Jonez]

But isn't that stupid?

Surly they should make it so it runs on hardware at least two years old? Personally I'd like them set the minimum requirements for a typical five year old machine.