Micro$oft Vi$ta discussion

[scotth_uk]

Anyone else playing with Vista yet?

I've had a good tinker with Beta2 and RC1 so far, on real machines and in virtual machines. Beta2 was a bit of a dog, but RC1 almost looks interesting.

My only concern is that Vista doesn't really offer me anything new. I have had a good play with it, and for the money I can't see why I should upgrade. Sure, it looks pretty but that's not enough.

Microsoft list the following:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/experiences/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/features/default.mspx

So, maybe it's:

• A more stable product
• Better with digital media, where we used external products before
• Better at searching/finding, where we used external products before
• More secure, where we used external products before

I say big deal! Vista is NOT cheap, and a lot of current hardware will need to be upgraded. Software costs between 155 and 325 pounds for not a lot extra.

Also, some people trawling the new licences have spotted the following interesting points:

• Vista licences can only be moved to another machine ONCE
• Vista Home versions cannot be run inside virtual machines

 

[SEM]

I'm not going to touch it for at least 2 more years, when XP came out it made 70% of my work software redundant for 6 months until everything got patched. Was it used on one of those 3d touch screens i've seen in an earlier post?

 

[masqueraid]

I'm sulking - still haven't had my copy of the release candidate

 

[scotth_uk]

Masqueraid,

Did you order on dvd? Downloading is very simple.

 

[masqueraid]

Yes, I was on the Beta1 program. M$ UK emailed & promised they'd post one out as soon as it was announced ... still waiting

Will eventually get 'round to downloading the ISO

(Especially as the alternative now is a £7 'admin' fee for the boxed version!)

Have two test boxes up at the moment one with VistaBeta/Office2007
one with Fedora/OpenOffice

 

[agatward]

RC2 won't even bloody install on my PC... sits there in an infinite reboot cycle despite all hardware being updated with latest firmware and all being listed as fully supported.

RC1 worked fine. Grr.

 

[Flyer]

I'm waiting until gold code, then putting in new proc/mb/gfx for it on my dev PC.

Anyone going to one of the EVO roadshows? I'm going to the Manchester one on 8 November.

 

[GregE240]

I've had Beta2 and RC1 installed on a second hard disk for this laptop (Pentium M, 1GB RAM, 64MB GPU).

It sucks. Its soooo slow (RC1 included), the worryingly the lack of drivers so near to RTM scares me - I had to fudge Netgear XP drivers to get wireless working (you know Netgear - that 2 bob obscure networking company nobodys ever heard of).

A lot of the visual treats simply will not switch on for this laptop, so it seems you will really need a bunch of new hardware to get it to run half decently.

And it pages. My God, it pages - the hard disk light is on almost continuously, yet I've no idea why.

Oh, and mobile device support - even in RC1 - is woeful.

RC1 should have been Beta3 as it still very much a WIP - not as much as B2 was (entire pieces of code missing), but for a Microsoft product to be this poor (my opinion) so close to RTM, concerns me. A lot.

 

[Flyer]

Also, some people trawling the new licences have spotted the following interesting points:

• Vista licences can only be moved to another machine ONCE
• Vista Home versions cannot be run inside virtual machines

Interesting article on Datamation about this.

Now comes word that Microsoft (Quote) has changed the licensing terms for the retail version of Vista. Customers will only be able to reinstall Vista on a new machine once. After that, they will have to buy a new copy of Vista.

The primary group that will be affected by this change in licensing is people who build their own PCs and update it incrementally. Some hobbyists like to upgrade their own PCs, replacing the CPU, memory or video card somewhere along the line.

With enough changes to a computer, eventually it is a whole new system, which is something of a gray area for WGA. The algorithm in Vista is "more liberal" in terms of the number of changes allowed before it assumes a new machine there compared to XP, said Boettcher.

Changing the motherboard and hard drive would be considered a major change, while memory or video upgrades won't be considered a major change.

Think this is going to cause quite a few problems

 

[scotth_uk]

Not wrong!

Dopey b*stards.

 

[scotth_uk]

Good news for those looking to buy a new pc soon:

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/10/24/5734

 

[Birdman]

FWIW if Vista runs inside a virtual machine how does it know if the PC's been upgraded or not?