Who Has It & First Impressions

[Steve R Jones]

I installed it this past weekend.

• Sempron 2400
• ATI 9600se
• 512meg of pc2700

So far so good. The install went without a hitch. Darn download took 4 to 5 hours. (2.4gigs)

[SuperSparks]

I've finished the download (13 hours for me ). I'll be installing in on Virtual PC later today, and then on my main rig maybe tomorrow or Saturday.

[Nix]

Not me.

Still happily running Win98SE / WinMe / Win2000 Pro triple boot at home.

Running WinNT at work.

Every person I have assisted with XP on their home PCs it seems to run like a dog - so I have not seen anything that makes me want to upgrade to it.

Maybe they've got the bare minimum machine specs.

Will be curious to see what the new Vista looks like - what are the minimum and recommended specs ?

[SuperSparks]

It's too early to say what the minimum and recommended specs will be, there is a lot of stuff that will be added in the later betas. With this beta, if you have a machine that will run XP, then it should be fine with Vista.

[Byan]

It's too early to say what the minimum and recommended specs will be, there is a lot of stuff that will be added in the later betas. With this beta, if you have a machine that will run XP, then it should be fine with Vista.

you really should say will run XP and like it..
I have seen people install XP on systems around 300mhz.., it runs..., sorta

[Nix]

Good one.

The first PC I had, was borrowed from my brother in law and was a 486sx33 with 4Mb ram and a 200Mb HD

It was running Win95 and had Office 95 installed on it.

I once tried to open a sample spreadsheet that came with Excel 95 and it took about 20 minutes with lots of chugging.

I upgraded the chip to a DX66 and added another 16Mb ram and cd-rom and sound card and it was a beautiful thing.....for it's time.

[Tarl]

Well to be honest, I've worked on many, many computers in the last 20 years and I've migrated away from Win2000 with a passion.

For me and the systems I've upgraded and maintain, WinXP Pro is by far a much more "user friendly" setup and just as stable. I left Win2000 years ago and never looked back.

As far as WinVista. Installed without a hitch, still has the typical "windows" look, but brought up to the 21st century. Folders and menus are tweaked and changed....virtual folders require some getting used to, but seem to work rather well.

WinVista Beta 1 is very quick, quicker even than WinXP on the same machine and appears to be very stable (especially for an early beta). Good job MS!

I had to dig around for some drivers.....to get my nforce2 NIC and soundblaster128 working, but once those were located, installed things are fine.

The system has been running pretty prob free since installation, I've added it to my local network and it is seen, can see all the other systems and it has trouble free internet access. Sweet!

Most of the programs I've installed and run work fine, motherboard monitor, Adaware, cpuidle, along with SiSoft Sandra and some other testing programs to "stress" the system.

Multimedia on the internet is fine, MP3 playing, CD's, file swapping on my network (Large amounts of data), all stable and prob free so far.

Will install more applications and programs (including games) in the next few days to continue testing. All in all so far I'm very impressed with the stability of the beta.

The eye candy, transparent borders, illuminating buttons are all nice. Internet Explorer 7 is a tabbed browser, much like Netscape 8. It appears to load up pages very quickly and has built in pop up stoppers ...etc.

All in all not a bad setup for now. I may migrate this over to my main machine for further testing also.

Tarl

[featherkids]

How did you get it? Is it out on the retail market yet?

[liam858]

Nope, the Beta version is available for Technet and MSDN subscribers.



Liam