Microsoft have realesed Windows Vista Beta 2 in an open beta Download it here

Microsoft made the Beta 2 version of Windows Vista available for public consumption. The release will be the biggest test yet for the company's next-gen operating system


not bad for anyone wanting to try it out legally.

im downloading it now the 32bit version is 3.5 gig
and 4.5gig for the 64bit ed

*yawn*

whats the difference between the 32 and 64 bit versions?

a gig of your hard drive

why not buy a 10gb hard drive to put vista in it.

why so large?

Tufnut, you installed this thing yet?

Nice, thanks man, I've been looking for a decent version to play with..

I'll have it soon I'll let ya'll know how it is

=)

http://www.intuit.net.au/images/albums/userpics/10001/dl.JPG

I installed it last night and it's pretty damn impressive. The UI is slick, explorer has changed quite a bit and it's alot more user friendly - moving towards OSX style of interface for a GUI.

Microsoft have improved the security aspects by basically prompting you for every tiny little piece of change along the way which I guess is useful for illeteriate computer users but started to piss me off last night.

Not much more to say other than I give it two thumbs up. It would have three but for some reason I can't get any games to run - they complain that DX 9.0c isn't installed when DX 10 is..

I need to buy an OS, should I wait for vista or spring for XP

What games tic ?

Im definately gonna give it a burn

Depends on your hardware specs since it's got some high requirements .. Check out the linky from Tuffnut about the download and it'll tell you the minimum specs required.

But, if I was going to pick between XP and Vista - it would be Vista. Why not grab the Beta copy and test it out on a second partition or something?

Only games I've tried are WoW & Eve. WoW won't even fire up in OpenGL.

It might be just my system though as any googling reports people playing games fine without needing to do anything to get them running.

Thats what you get for playing wow :p

What system you running tic?

Post some sexc screenshots ?

Thank you for your interest in Windows Vista Beta 2.

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I'm running it on my laptop - Dell Inspiron 6400 (Duo 1.83, 1Gb RAM, 256Mb X1400 Mobility Radeon). Here's some tantalizing screenshots;

http://www.gronks.com/vista/qgl_screen1.jpg
- Showing the basic look and feel as it comes.
- Shows IE7
- Gadgets down the side to have CPU usage/clock/calender .. there's a bunch of other default ones but they aren't that special. RSS news readers, calculator, etc.
- Taskbar down the bottom now gives a mini-view of what the application is doing.

http://www.gronks.com/vista/qgl_screen2.jpg
- Showing off the new start menu and the 'Computer' area. You can tell just from that how OSX-like it's starting to appear with the shaded borders, funkier icons, etc.

http://www.gronks.com/vista/qgl_screen3.jpg
- Showing the Network Center & Control Panel. Network Center is neat and actually does allow painless configuration of Wireless networks, etc. Control Panel has been rejigged for better grouping of items.
- You can see the opacity (user set) between the two windows as well

ET: I had that problem too, but if you go back a page there is a link they give you for use with a download manager. That's just a direct link to the ISO which I used to download it ;)

anyone know of an iinet mirror?

Fark yeah, hot

How bout device manager, how was it with your hardware ?

Does it run bf2?

Looks sweet as, looking forward to it... Would it be safe to say that we can use this beta as our everyday OS, or is it buggy as?

How bout task manager, mem usage etc etc

Device Manager shows up only 1 yellow device which is some s***ty audio out digital doobie thing. All I can say is that I reinstalled XP on this laptop on Thursday and I needed device drivers galore from Dell. Vista detected everything (other than the above driver) and it worked first time. Video, Wireless, Bluetooth, Power management, etc. It just works..

As for being buggy, I installed it last night at about 8 and it's been running overnight without any crashes from any applications. Even the Citrix web client which when I installed, Vista popped up a warning saying that it is not compatability and it may crash, etc has been running smoothly (been logged into a Citrix session all night - oh the perils of being oncall).

Task manager is the same as it is in XP. CPU usage is maybe 10% but memory usage is pretty high, just with Citrix, IE, MSN running I've only got 530Mb of available physical memory left.

-- Success with Eve btw, just needed a registry entry to say where the fonts directory is in Vista and away it went.

Nice Nice, well my lappys got 1.5GB of ram so hopefully It'll be dandy

It's "Expanding Files" at the moment, f*** it takes ages

what did you guys install the 64bit ed or the 32bit? and did you have aby trouble with duel boot?

Expanding files took for f***in ever.. I installed the 32bit and it auto setup duel booting.

Come to think of it - should I be using the 64bit?

well ateast they have got decent bandwidth http://img87.imageshack.us/img87/5486/download6wb.th.jpg

it looks overly dongs, in terms of eye candy for noob users etc

I just want an OS that works, no pretty pictures

I downloaded the first half at 5MB, second half at 3-4, they got some wickkkkked bw

reminds me too much of s***ty mac UI

Now I understand why the UI is called Glass, and why it is such a system hog. Transparent window borders with blur and distortion effects. Miniature windows in the task bar.
Looks like everyone will need a “Gaming machine” to run this OS. Just so long as it has been optimized to use as little resources as possible, and won’t be a drain while gaming. Should be good.

My worst fear is that it will have a mind of its own and run its self. Chuck a CD in and it’ll start up programs to view what ever files are on the disc. eg. Put in a Music CD and Media player will automatically start ripping songs to your My Music folder.

Any ideas on how to rollback ?

I've installed it, runs fine, albeit a bit slow for my liking..

It's definately cool, but too slow to be practical on my little lappy..

I've Got it installed in C:\Windows and its stuck my old version of xp in C:\Windows.old

If I change boot options in advanced system properties, it just sits there and doesnt boot properly.. ?

http://www.vistabootpro.org/

it looks overly dongs, in terms of eye candy for noob users etc

Oh the irony HeardY.....

;)

Any ideas on how to rollback ?

I've installed it, runs fine, albeit a bit slow for my liking..

It's definately cool, but too slow to be practical on my little lappy..

I've Got it installed in C:\Windows and its stuck my old version of xp in C:\Windows.old

If I change boot options in advanced system properties, it just sits there and doesnt boot properly.. ?

Did you see this before you downloaded it?

In addition, once you install Windows Vista Beta 2 (or RC1) you cannot roll back to the previous operating system installation—you will either have to acquire and install the final released edition of Windows Vista or reinstall a previous edition of Windows. Before installing Windows Vista Beta 2 on any computer, please remember to back up all your files.

i dont think that applys if you are dual booting though.

atleast i hope not :S cause thats what im doing..

Well i have been using it for about an hour and i can say its not bad, not really much better than XP but it does have alot more 'Security Features'

like the firewall it seems to be more intrusive..i have also found that im using 50% of my memory just running the OS, i have 1gig ram.

it doesnt seem to run slow but still i think the main difference between Vista and Xp is the Skin.

Also office 2007 beta 2 is teh gay, it requires a reboot after its installed.

last edited by TufNuT at 19:30:13 10/Jun/06

haha Opec, I did know what I was saying ;)

was waiting for someone to comment :)

Will I have any problems if I split my big partition and install it on say a 10 gig partition (ie dual-boot)? And can I access my NTFS drives easily?

Also office 2007 beta 2 is teh gay, it requires a reboot after its installed.

Welcome to the world of windows [read : dynamic link library registration & load] mate...

/jumping on the Mac OS-X ripoff bandwagon
/jumping on the *nix style permissions associated with all programs/files/paths etc bandwagon

Questions:
* What kind of boot times are you getting? (and please quote your XP times for comparison)
* Can you deliberately crash one program & see if it brings down the entire OS? [Does explorer.exe restart itself if killed after ~7 secs like in XP/2K?]
* What kind of DRM s*** do you see when you pop in a CD/DVD etc?
* Can you easily get under the bonnet & disable all the eye-candy, making it look like the good-old 2K style interface without the frills? [Does this improve performance?]

Will I have any problems if I split my big partition and install it on say a 10 gig partition (ie dual-boot)? And can I access my NTFS drives easily?

10 gig is not enough. out of the 23gig partition i created 16gig is left over and that is only the OS, besides i wont let you install unless you have a minimum of 15gig free space.
as for accessing your drive, well mine is also NTFS, when you try to go into a folder it will tell you you dont have permission but will give you an option to get permission, a few seconds latter you can open the folder...Awsome security! not.

What kind of boot times are you getting? (and please quote your XP times for comparison)

im not sure exactlly how much time my Xp machine boots but it doesnt take long, Vista is notably slower, but it does getfaster once all the drivers are recognised, also i found that once i installed NOD32 CPU usage went to 100% and would never go down nor could i find which Process was using 100% cpu but after 3 reboots it works fine with NOD32...

Can you deliberately crash one program & see if it brings down the entire OS? [Does explorer.exe restart itself if killed after ~7 secs like in XP/2K?]

yeah. also when i first installed it explorer "Stopped working" was the message that poped up and it was restarted.

What kind of DRM s*** do you see when you pop in a CD/DVD etc?

So far none, but then i havent tried to rip any music yet.

Can you easily get under the bonnet & disable all the eye-candy, making it look like the good-old 2K style interface without the frills? [Does this improve performance?]

yea you can turn off the setings some example here..but the only thing i could find to turn off is the glass effect, i think ill need to do some digging to find out who to turn off the rest, but yes just turrning off glass made a some difference.
http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/3258/settings0vg.th.jpg
http://img91.imageshack.us/img91/7237/desktoppic9kb.th.jpg

over all its not bad, i wouldnt use it as my main OS, which is why im dual booting it with XP. some of its more anoying aspects are eveytime you try to do something, e.g. a program trys to connect to the net, the whole screen gose gray and you get a message asking weather to allow the action..same thing happens when a program that hasnt run before trys running..its a f***ing pain and all you have to do is simply click allow..i cant really see this being a very good security feature as i my self have stopped reading the messagesand just click allow..

i highly doubt the every day n00b user will do much different..
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/9899/shutdown5ik.th.jpg

last edited by TufNuT at 11:55:49 11/Jun/06

Tuf go into users and you can turn that s*** the f*** off, god its annoying

Whats the new beta office suite like ?

Any cool s*** in outlook ?

to be honest i havet really played with it yet. Vista is still giving me s*** cause of NOD32, as soon as i enable the active scanning, svchost.exe uses up 100% CPU, it really starting to piss me off, also i seem to keep losing my internet connection.

it wiered will let me connect to local network only..then by itself will connect to internet then drop it again..f***en annoying...im back on Xp now cause i have to study for an exam on tuseday.

but ill say this the new Word is a f*** peice of s***..to give you an idea of how slow it is, i type a few words then wait abut a second for them to appear on the screen...letter by letter :| (this is when im not having any cpu usage problems i.e NOD is Disabled) my system specs are:

--AMD 64 3400+
--1gig Corsair ram
--120gig hdd (23gig partition for vista)
--60 gig hdd
--Nvidia 6800 GT 256mb


last edited by TufNuT at 12:47:45 11/Jun/06

Installed it on my P4 3.2/i865/512/120gig wd sata/HDTV card/6600GT AGP box last night, using default windows xp bda drivers for leadtek dtv1000T card, very impressed with it does every thing that mce2005 does (cept for xbox360 extender support grr), other then 360 conectivity its a keeper ihmo, also got osx cloneage?

Yeah, it doesn't like virus scanners it seems

It wasn't interested in AVG

Tuf what motherboard do you have?

i have an MSI K8T Neo MS-6702

Click here

last edited by TufNuT at 13:46:07 11/Jun/06

Yeah, I think its most likely it just doesn't like your board..

I assume you've installed the 64bit version?

I have a 64 3000+ and its far from stable, haven't tried vista on it yet though, I'll do it when I am very bored

Edit: No, according to ^ you're 32bit, maybe try 64bit ?

last edited by jmr at 13:53:57 11/Jun/06

When does it expire?

Neverrrrrr

man i cbf dowloading the 64bit version, besides if i do i wont be able to run anything on it.

I'll dl it here if you are interested

What can you run on the 32bit anyway ?

i was going to try to install a few games, F.E.A.R, HL2 and Doom 3 to see how well my machine copes.
i mite do that latter today, i really need to study this damn cisco s*** f***ing stupid exma..

jmr, did you manage to solve your boot/rollback issue?

last edited by TufNuT at 15:33:57 11/Jun/06

natslovR, July 2007.

I havnt had a problem duel booting when i was playing around with it 8-12 months ago, and easy to get rid of the 2nd boot loader vista installs. looks much the same part from the desktop "Gadgets down the side to have CPU usage/clock/calender"

tho back in those days it seemed to just halt for a second or two everynow and then while switching focus and whatnot.
but firefox, thunderbird, winamp and everything else worked pretty dam well.
getting games to work involved throwing in the 9.0c~ .dlls manually

Yeah, heh formatted just before someone posted that boot thing :(

But its cool, I needed to change my partitions anyway

XP is sooo fast !

Installed it on a 2600xp, gf4, 512 ram, runs fine. Had a little play... IE 7 is nice

well i installed HL2, the install went through with out a hitch, once that was done i set the vieo settings in the game to 1024*768 and everything turned to high also ran it with AA 4x

the game took a while to load but once it was loaded it ran smoothly, appart from the occational split second lag, i was quite happy with the preformance. if some one can tell me how to run the speed test in HL2 i will and ill post some results.

28% and counting at a whopping 50k/s

should be there in about a day

Where are you 3d? Gimme $5 and save yourself the trouble >?

i tried to install it, but it wouldnt work. I tried to do it from within winodws the custom option, once it gets the 52% it comes up with a copy error or something. And when i try to do it from booting the dvd rom, it copies the files to memory and then shows the load screen with the gray moving bar, then it starts to go into the part were u can move the mouse and then it just restarts.
i also tried formating my drive and then booting from dvd same thing happened.
Im running XP x64 atm.
p4 3ghz
1 gb ram
p5p800 mb
geforce 6800 gt
320 gb hdd
Do you guys have any ideas??

hmm..i found that my creative Audigy LS kept causing Vista to blue screen abd reboot..however i was acctually able to get into Safe mode to disbale it..

did you run the compatiblity check program? if not click here and download the Windows Vista Upgrade Advisor beta

last edited by TufNuT at 20:17:02 12/Jun/06

the update adviser is not compatible with windows x64

oh well..thats typical MS gayness for ya..sorry i got no other sugestions other than maybe check the MS tech forums..

I just installed it on my old p3 866mhz and I must say it is nice & fast even on that s*** old pc. Not to mention S.M.A.R.T. warns the the current hard drive is good for nothing but landfill and should be replaced.

I must say, I will not be going over to vista retail unless I absolutely have to. I HATE the user interface. It's an absolute steaming pile of s***.

^^indeed i think MS must have hired GUI designers from Apple..the whole damn thing looks like a mac osx clone.

I love it when you talk dirty whoop :)

Anyone know where I could find a vista compatible GO6400 driver?

Got some more screenshots for ya'll

Seems I cant screen capture while running the Aero theme, which is why I am chasing a different driver..

http://www.intuit.net.au/images/albums/userpics/10001/bitmorerice.PNG
Default image format is now PNG, which is a nice change.

http://www.intuit.net.au/images/albums/userpics/10001/fewwindows.PNG
There is also the ability to use the classic theming, but the ram usage is still over 600mb..

http://www.intuit.net.au/images/albums/userpics/10001/howboutno.PNG
This security s*** is really getting annoying, because it always sits there annoying you, you can't really completely turn it off

http://www.intuit.net.au/images/albums/userpics/10001/media.PNG
Annnnnnd this is the new media centre, which I havent had much time to play with yet

looks flash ... hmm wandering if i should install this on my work laptop or will i have nightmares with it

Specs ?

Dont even think about it unless you've got a partition you can dedicate

jmr, where do you go for that media centre?

Holy crap.

Just installed Vista-x64.

I suspect I won't be upgrading for a very long time unless I'm shown something to make me like this thing very soon. So far, I utterly hate using it.

Are you guys all so blind that you need huge ass icons and a cluttered menu system?

I honestly just don't get it

yeah the icon anoy me but its either that or bigger..cause thats as small as they come

Are you guys all so blind that you need huge ass icons and a cluttered menu system?

I honestly just don't get it

that's the default size and it's quite the suck. imho vista os was made for newbie computer users and blind people.

I can understand and appreciate the level to which MS is wanting to log my hardware configuration with the existing installed/registered programs for error-analysis, but I'm hearing alarm bells in the back of my mind while using Vista atm.


I like the fact that MS are going to greater lengths to identify potential hardware errors long before the user experiences any serious problems (why doesn't XP log this much stuff yet? It's about time!!)


That said, I'm glad I ran the 32-bit ver in a VM - my firewall has been going off it's tits. Does anyone have any relevent info on the data Vista sends up the line?


/me keeps googling

last edited by koopz at 21:15:26 15/Jun/06

do i have to sort of uninstall it at all? So that the booting is back to normal. or does that new booter work fine on a single xp install?

the new booting is fine. just annoying having to go through 2 bootloaders to use your normal xp install
i forget it all now but you use the cmdline to change or competely turn off the new vista bootloader
google it

Has anyone managed to get the latest forceware (nvidia video) drivers installed with an Nforce chipset motherboard?

Specs -
A8N-SLI
a64 3200+
2 gig RAM
7900GT Video
SBLive

Pretty much everything installed itself with generic drivers, the SBLive installed from windows updates. Even my crappo Twinhan TV tuner installed (though its jerky as f***).

Problems so far -
* still have one unknown device
* gameport on SBLive has the ! mark (dont care about this)
* can't install the latest forceware drivers

When I go to windows update there is 2 optional drivers, one for my TV Tuner that apparently doesnt install but says it is. The other is NVIDIA - system - nForce4 PCI-Express Root Port which makes my screen go off and stay off when it installs... same as the forceware drivers.


If I try to install the vid drivers, it gets halfway through where the screen usually flicks off and on again it just stays off and never comes back. I have to restart and everything is fine again.

Using it as a desktop machine web/music/chat proggies its working great. Have a bunch of programs working on it fine. GAIM and foobar2000 were ones that I was a bit doubtful about that are quite happily running.

Oh and the stupid little security alert icon that appears in the task bar won't f*** off even if I tell it to NOT notify me >:|

last edited by rubba-chikin at 20:27:08 16/Jun/06

Well I think I've pretty much given up on Vista.

I installed x64 last night - couldn't get various things working, I figured it might have just been drivers. So I installed x86 thisevening - same problems.

Basically, I can't even get Internet Explorer to let me get to anything - in fact, anything which requires a socket connection to be made past the gateway can't make the connection. Well, almost. DNS works. Everything else tht I've tried fails. Internally though, no problems whatsoever.

Yes, firewalling is off.

Seems to me like they've got a hell of a long way to go.

Oh one other problem I had was the nforce onboard network does not get an IP using DHCP (googled it and others were reporting the same thing) apparently static addressing works, but I just threw in a realtek pci nic I had kicking around and away it went with no worries.

Just incase people are still reading this thread a few interesting things I noticed while playing around today.

Even though the nvidia drivers seems to crap out when installing (for me anyway), they do infact install as it says in device manager that the card is using nvidia drivers.

I thought I'd see if I could actually run games. HL2 ran, but not really that well jerked a bit every now and then.


So I though hrm I'll go all out and see if 3dmark05 actually runs... and suprisingly it did.
XP Score - 8456
Vista Score (full glass aero theme) - 7135
Vista Score (classic theme) - 7138


So overall for a non-optimised OS it didn't fair too badly, and I guess it also shows that turning off the candy does f*** all for performance (providing you have decent hardware).


Only real problems I have now is that it won't play .mp4 h264 codec(i think) movies and no burning software seems to want to work. Other than that I'm pretty much using this as a stable everyday OS and all my proggies are working, even photoshop.

Have another problem :(

When I am running the Aero theme, and try to take a screenshot, it f***s out something chronic

I'm pretty sure it is a driver issue (can someone confirm?)

But I havent been able to find any alternatives as yet

http://www.intuit.net.au/images/albums/userpics/10001/fukkk.PNG

Its an nvid 6400 Go

it's probably a digital copyright protection thing like macrovision.

I see it has the customer experience program thing or whatever it's called, as seen in messenger. So basically windows is now nothing more than glorified spyware sending your computing habits and hardware (probably software too) info off to MS for demographic studies.

mine works fine in aero glass
http://img159.imageshack.us/img159/5182/vista6ug.jpg

Yeah, I know for a fact its not a protection thing

Like even when I open the snip tool, it goes all f***ed up like that :|

http://download.windowsvista.com/preview/beta2/en/x86/download.htm

OMG YOU CAN DOWNLOAD IT !

I'm so watching snatch again

does anyone know if there are product keys available for this or am i too late?

http://blogs.msdn.com/tims/archive/2006/07/03/655361.aspx :/