Windows Vista Beta 2: installed on my primary machine

Jul 2, 2006 • Windows

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.