Vista Ultimate Beta 2 5384

Microsoft released beta 2 of vista a couple of days ago which I can safely say I just managed to get working. A msdn key, swapped lan card later, she runs fine. I am still going through some issues. I have an nvidia geforce 3 card which apparently has new vista only drivers on the nvidia site. When I run their installer, I get an error indicating that this file has no drivers for my vid card. I find this hard to believe as the drivers say geforce and are for Beta 2. Odd....for now Ill just use the default drivers. I am about to load VS 2005 and begin the real testing with IIS 7 . I already installed IIS 7 [ as it isnt on by default in Vista Ultimate] and managed to point to my site easier than the 5301 beta. The only other issue I had was audio play back in WMP 11. The first build worked fine;however, beta 2 made my music choppy and would often pause the system. I plan to go download winamp and try.

A simple review
Now for the fun stuff...the things I liked.

Security
I like the new security approach Vista has. It really wont let you do anything without your permission and now greys the screen until you respond with a course of action. This obviously shows the need of new security measures. The login is quite cool because it reminds you of your password if you fail. You see...it only takes a little thinking and boom a nice OS.

Vista Aware
I also liked what I call "Vista awareness". It seems Vista is more aware of whats going on in your computing experience. For example, it knows that you have failed to install your lan card and recommends solutions. I could get used to being recommended options to fix things. It knows more about the presence of networks [ esp the internet] and shows more paths to them then just mucking with it till it works like in XP.

Hardware

Even though I had an issue with my lan card, vista worked well with PNP devices and even "safely" removing them. This option in XP was pointless in my view as it hardly ever worked and most users would just take it out anyway.

Application Speed

Microsoft has this new recent application stack that you can clearly notice working. If you load one application and close it, you will get a speed boost the second time. Of course this has been done in recent versions of Windows however there is new code from the ground up in this new approach. Applications seem to load faster than XP and more crisp with the new UI.

Conclusion

All in all, yes Im very impressed. The install was effortless and I mounted it with simple d-tools [ which needs to be fixed to work in Vista pleassssse] to install to the same drive while in Windows 2003. I still havent got into heavy programming on it and will make another entry on that. Its been pretty stable so far but I await the next release.

Cheers
Link : Paul's Review