I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 on my laptop yesterday (my primary machine). I didn't have the correct video driver upon install, so everything was 800x600 with only 8bit colors. But the cool thing was; Windows Update had the latest video driver for my hardware listed; so I installed that and everything worked fine. The install for Vista only had 2 steps: 1) enter key, 2) hard drive partitions. It did everything else automagically. Very easy to install!
You are probably thinking I have a pretty fast/new laptop, right? Well, actually my laptop is about 2.5 years old. Below is a comparison of the
minimum requirements to my configuration:
|
Vista Minimum
Supported Requirements |
My Laptop Config |
| Processor |
800Mhz 32-bit(x86) or 64bit(x64) |
2.4Ghz 32-bit(x86) Celeron |
| System Memory |
512MB |
512MB |
| GPU |
SVGA(800x600) |
SVGA(1024x768) |
| Graphics Memory |
- |
64MB |
And with the above configurations, Vista actually runs pretty well. I did however change the visual style to the "Windows Classic" instead of the "Windows Vista Basic" because it seem to increase the performance a little.
I'm still playing around with the new/changed features of the OS, but so far I like it. I also installed Office 2007 Beta and IIS7 Beta.