Windows Vista Beta 2 - Part 1 - Installation

Well, after my last blog, which was rather harshly critical of both Office and Vista beta 2, I thought I would give both another try. It may not be right away, but hopefully in the coming weeks I will get round to it. While I'm at it, I may even give Windows Server Longhorn beta 2 a test too... So watch this space!

I'll start by looking at Vista beta 2 again.

I would like to start by saying that I have been waiting for this release for a long time now. A lot of people are excited about the next version of Windows - a lot has been promised, many delays have been experienced, and I think most people want to see if Microsoft are going to deliver even a fraction of what they've promised with Vista.

Before Beta 2, the last build of Vista I played with was Build 5231 CTP, which was released on the 17th October 2005 - over 6 months before beta 2! That actually ran pretty well on both my desktop and my laptop, although it wouldn't work in a virtual machine, and I was pretty happy with it's performance and stability. My main grievance at that point was most of my drivers wouldn't work in Vista, along with some of my applications, and so I couldn't use it on my primary machines.

Beta 2 is the first build of Vista (previously Codenamed "Longhorn") I've seen which does run in a virtual machine, since I started testing on Beta 1 builds. When I say runs in a virtual machine... the graphics for the installation are no where near as good as when it runs on an actualy machine (possibly limited to 16 colours?), but this could be due to the virtual machine - I vaguely recall a similar effect with previous Windows installations.

After setup is completed (pretty briskly, especially considering a) it's in a virtual machine, and b) compared to previous builds), Vista presented me with the following screen:

Despite the fact I'd already told it I was in the UK and wanted a UK keyboard layout, it asked me again. Don't know why, but it's little touches like this that you think they'd get right.

You then get prompted for a username and password, a machine name, automatic update settings, and your time, date and timezone settings. Then "You're ready to start". Woo hoo.

Overall, a pretty painless installation process, ignoring the fact that it asked me twice for my region and keyboard preferences. But even compared to XP installation, which was greatly improved over 98, Vista is pretty slick.

And now it's late, and I will continue this critique tomorrow... :)

Office 2007 and Vista beta 2

Well, like many people out there, I obtained a copy of the latest betas from Microsoft: Office 2007, and Windows Vista.

I've been running Internet Explorer 7 beta and Windows Media Player 11 beta on my laptop for a few weeks now. I've been pretty impressed with both of them really, and I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for the launch of Vista beta 2. So I thought I'd download it, and Office 2007 while I was at it.

As I'm in the middle of writing up my fourth year thesis, I thought it would be the perfect test for an Office beta. Which, I suppose, was correct. However, I found so many annoying bugs that just made it unusable while writing my thesis, that I had to uninstall it after just two days!

In fact, considering Office 2007 beta 2 is a public release beta, I thought it was pretty unusable. It's fair to say that I had a lot more problems using it on my desktop than my laptop, and I'm not really sure why. At least part of that is probably due to the fact that I prefer to edit my thesis on my desktop (I prefer the two large monitors, the proper mouse, etc). But when you can't do simple tasks, like copying a chart out of Excel into a Word document without having both applications crash, you're onto a loser really. Some of the bugs I found in Office include:

• Copying a chart from Excel to word caused application hangs (Word, Excel)
• Mail server certificates not accepted, and no way of importing one (Outlook)
• Application crash on inserting a file or picture (Word)
• General application instability (Word, Excel, Outlook)
• RSS feeds stopped feeding after a reboot (Outlook)
  

There are more, but for now I can't remember them. Also, when I actually uninstalled Office 2007 and reinstalled office 2003 Pro, the problems persisted, so I had to re-Ghost to get back to a working system. Thank god for Symantec's Incremental Ghosts, that's all I can say!

Vista was a different story. That ran so slowly on my laptop, that I got rid of it after about half an hour. Was not impressed.

I realise this is a pretty lame first entry. I'm new to the technical blogging lark, so bear with me. In the coming weeks, months, maybe even years, I'll be writing about technical things I do with computers that I find interesting enough to share with other people.

If anyone else actually reads this, that is...