For tech-heads...

[Liam]

Any of you downloaded the official Vista beta 2 yet? If so, what are your thoughts?

I got my x64 version and my activation code last night and I have to say I'm fairly impressed. I realise that the new interface is just pure eye candy (and that its now possible in XP) but it looks so damn good.

Thoughts? Although MS probably wont be too concerned about torrent leaks of a beta OS as it only gives them a wider test base, steer clear of piracy talk.

[deviljet88]

I heard it kills computer memory, and if I've only got 512... Nah. After all, I'm using the Windows Classic look on XP.

[Liam]

Memory footprint is fucking enormous.

At idle on XP my Athlon 4400+ is using 250 odd MB. Vista is using 800 odd.

Guess its lucky I have 4GB, eh? :P

[Liam]

A lot of great stuff has been dropped...WinFS is a prime example. Just yesterday they announced the new document sync package would also be dropped.

The eye candy is lovely though. Not that much difference in footprint with it disabled, so I'm leaving it on. Gaming performance is a bit slower than XP but thats more due to early driver builds than anything else.

[ryan]

work's got volume licesning for nearly all products MS and i've used every beta of Vista since the first.

[Liam]

I hadnt used one since the leaked 4073, which I think came from last years WinHEC.

Obviously a huge improvement but I think I'll still wait for RC1 to be released before I think about installing it as a full time OS on any of my computers.

[ryan]

it's not something i'd use for more than a few hours and definitely not something i'd use when doing something important for work
definitely cant do any code/compiling in it

i eagerly await its release, though.

[Liam]

I remember back when whistler RC1 was released it was more or less a usable operating system for everyday use. Driver support was minimal but at the time most users weren't doing anything particularly taxing.

Vista itself taxes the system hardware so drivers for RC1 will have to be a lot better than the comparable releases for XP RC1. Will be interesting to see.

[deviljet88]

MS dropped yet an other function (http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,2180,1973620,00.asp) out of Vista.

Just use Hamachi (assuming you basically want to hook up computers remotely into a network via the Internet). It's what some friends and I use for gaming at least :P