The really big news for today was that we officially released Windows Vista Beta 2 to the masses. If you've been following the progress of Vista betas, you'll see just how far things have come from Vista Beta 1 (released in the middle of last year) and even the CTP (community technology preview) builds released every few months since then. Vista has evolved remarkably in the last four months, and it's gotten to the point that I don't run XP anymore ... at all.
Layla and I upgraded the workstation here at the house last weekend with a recent Vista build and it's actually doing the job quite nicely. There are a few small fit-and-finish bugs, but the system is damned stable and is actually faster than XP once everything was loaded and settled. It took a day or so for the system to settle itself after the initial install (Vista defrags itself automatically and the search indexer took a while to catalog most of the junk I've got on the machine) but now that the difficult work is finished, it actually loads most programs quicker than they did under XP.
And I think the best part is that even while overlaying Vista on top of my existing XP build (without doing a clean installation), nearly all of my programs work out of the box without a reinstall. There are only a few exceptions (things like Daemon Tools and, err, RealPlayer) but so far, I haven't had to do any serious mucking about to get everything working. I think that's the part that makes this so very cool—sure, the new OS is shiny and blingtastic, but it's also relatively painless to upgrade. Awesome.
Did you just snag a disc from the burnlab to install on your machines at home and get keys from mspkd? Or is there another process we follow for taking these builds home? Anyway, I'm probably going to put it on my main dev box sometime this summer once I hit code complete since I haven't installed a build since I left COSD, which was in October. Needless to say, lots has happened since then. :) Also, is the new OS really blingtastic with a normal machine? I thought you had to have new shiny bits in your computer to get all of that stuff. Or do you have lots of shiny stuff in all your computers? I don't upgrade mine enough.
Yep—disc from the burnlab and PID from the internal site.
I've been using it on all my machines at the office since ... probably, mid-March or so. I've got a Server 2003 install that I keep as a backup in case something goes horribly horribly wrong and I need to switch back, but once I got past the silly differences (see below), I haven't needed to actually boot into it.
The "silly differences" I speak of involve not being able to remap all my mouse buttons—I'm so tied to having the "forward" button mapped to "minimize" that I couldn't use Vista for more than a few minutes without having to switch back. The same goes for any OS; I sure loves me my minimize button.
well its good for someone to not like xp. i hate xp and i work with it. My whole company is now usiing either windows vista enterprise or ultimate - deppending on the pc spec. so good on ya.
I LOVE VISTA -
neologicial or jake
Jake-
Good to hear that you're switching over!
Just to be clear, though, I don't dislike XP at all--but Vista does offer a whole lot more.
The reason I wrote the post (the better part of a year ago) was to dispel the rumor that migrating to Vista would be a risky thing.
--Dan