I took the plunge on Saturday and installed Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2.á I am fairly impressed with Vista so far.á The 3D flip is prettyáfreaking cool and I love having the ability to type in the name of an executable in the start menu.áI have gotten a few errors and it does not seem to remember what you have open on the desktop when it goes into hibernate mode, but other than that it is working fine.á I also notice that browsing on the internet and changing OS settings are way more secure.á Hopefully this will limit the damage that can be done by spyware.á
Office was easy to install, but I had to run the executable as Administrator (I thought I have downloaded a bad .exe and did the whole thing all over again).á In Outlook, I was able to connect easily to my Exchange server and download email with no problems.
My machine is pretty beefy.á I have a 3.4 GHz P4 with 2 Gs ofáRAM and it still gets slow every once in a while.á You also need a video card that has at least 64 Megs of VRAM to view all of the nice UI enhancements.
To learn more about Vista check here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/.
To see if your machine can run Vista, check here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/upgradeadvisor/default.mspx
To download Vista, check here: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/preview.mspx
One thing about installing Vista, it is better to install a clean version of XP SP2 and then upgrade to Vista rather than trying to install from scratch. It tried it and it asked from a lot of drivers that I did not have.
I'll report back soon as my beta experience unfolds.
Happy Coding!áááá