I´m not puttin Vista on my machines before upgradin' to Conroe or Athlon 4X or 8X!!!
I´m planning to spend about 320 Euros on a mobo, Ram and a intel P4 D 805 (cause intel said it will drop off the 805 to Usd 93 and the P4 D 805 can be hugely overclockedhttp://www.tomshardware.com/2006/06/12/your_diy_gaming_rig_for_720/) and even so, it´s not seeing Vista for now. What a waste of cycles...
Sorry, this is off topic but it´s my first impression based on yours.

well i actually got a "stable" install of Vista 32-bit up and going.  turns out the culprit in my system was the spare WD800JB that I was using for a boot drive. no  blue screens or crashes yet, but plenty messages asking to send info back to MS regarding failed host services.  even got media center up and running, though i must say that 10-foot interface in for MCE seems to have been reduced to a 4 or 5 foot interface.  seems too busy with smaller bits of text floating around the make you squint at the screen.

I installed Vista Beta II on a new Intel Core-Duo iMac and have to say that it's too big, slow and can't use most of the drivers, so nothing useful works. The user account protection thingumy is a nightmare waiting to come true. Some sort of constant cataloguing is going on, so it might take a while for it to settle down after an upgrade from XP or 2000. The display driver works fine, mouse and keyboard, network card and IE7, but that's about all. The whole Aero interface looks as groovy as Bill Gates hairdo, but obviously taxes the performance of the new ATI Radeon X1600 video card. The general consensus here is this isn't a Beta, maybe an optimistic Alpha Prime, nobody in their right senses would release this and expect a reaction other than derision.

I'm not hearing a lot of raves.

I finally got it to install - I found that some long forgotten anti-virus software was guilty. Once I zapped that, the install went just fine, using the 32-bit version.

The system:

Packard-Bell, 2.66 GHz
1.5 Gb RAM
Nvidia GeForce GX5200 128 Mb video card
Realtek RTL8139 NIC
2 hard drives: 100 Gb & 120 Gb

First job was to set up the network, which consists of:

   - the Vista machine
   - my main workhorse, a Dell running XP
   - a Linux box (also Packard Bell)
   - a Belkin router/ADSL modem
   - a Belkin printer server

Setting up was straightforward (although Vista seems a little obsessed with wireless networks - mine is wired). Vista can see the other 2 machines, but they can’t see the Vista box, even with the Vista firewall disabled. Not sure why this is yet.

No problem with connecting to the Internet but a BIG problem using it, in the shape if IE7. The “security” features are absurd. It’s unusable. After 15 minutes I decided to use it for the last time, to download Firefox.

I installed Apache and MySQL then copied across a complex Web-based database that I maintain. I could access this from the other two machines with no problem.

Synergy works, but won’t auto start - I have to start it manually. There seems to be no way to install it so that it comes up before login to allow me to log in from my main keyboard (I can do this without problems on the Linux box).

My 2 printers, a LaserJet and a Photosmart, work fine in local mode but the Belkin printer server software won’t install. Since the LaserJet is normally connected to the printer server, this means it can’t be used from Vista.

To test the printers, I installed OpenOffice, the word processing part of which works fine (I haven’t had time to try the rest yet).

Initial impressions: MS has been deservedly criticized over security issues. I haven’t been following the details (there are too many!) but I have the impression that most problems were due more to sloppy programming (i.e., allowing a virus to overrun a buffer) than to user incompetence. I don’t know whether that has been fixed inside Vista, but the User Account Control “feature” doesn’t strike me as a sensible fix. In fact it quickly drove me wild and I disabled it and I suspect that most users will do the same. Can’t they distinguish between commands coming from the keyboard/mouse and those from elsewhere?

Getting programs to run at startup is a lot easier than with XP, at last! But I want to know how to get them to run before login!

Visually, it’s neat, but I have a minimalist approach to desktops - plain black background, keep everything simple, so frankly my Vista desktop doesn’t look a whole lot different to my XP and Linux desktops. Ease of use is probably slightly better than XP, but I need to play with it some more before I decide. The same with speed - it doesn’t feel any slicker or faster than XP did on the same machine. Given the 2.66 GHz processor speed, I was expecting it to be sluggish and was pleasantly surprised to find it otherwise.

No BSOD (yet)!

I forgot one thing - suddenly I have no sound system! And apparently no way of installing it. This leaves me with just pathetic bleats from the system speaker.

I'm not hearing a lot of raves.

True, I'm not "raving" about it because I know it's a Beta release. Beta isn't final code...and this is only the second of the Beta's to come out.

But, it's my main OS right now and I use it everyday. I've gotten everything to work that I use so far...except for DVD movies. Still can't play them on my machine...no matter if I have the Nvidia PureVideo codec loaded or not.

It's buggy, but I haven't had a crash in a few days so it's somewhat stable. I play World of Warcraft and switch back and forth between that and the desktop all the time...with no problems other than it being a little sluggish. 1Gig of RAM is not enough for Vista in the way I use a computer, that's for sure. Other people who only surf the web and do email and Office type stuff shouldn't have that big of a problem with 1Gig. But in the state it's in now, I wouldn't recommend anything below 1Gig of RAM.

But again, it's still beta software that's not even going to be released for another 8 months, how can we get a rave reviews for something that's beta and 8 months from release (at the moment)? I'm not trying to defend Microsoft here, but come on! This is a MAJOR OS upgrade and quite frankly, I'm amazed at how well it does work. I was expecting a nightmare, but certainly didn't get that.

well i have been using my "stable" install of Vista all morning long and no real problems to complain about.  i got firefox installed with all of my usual extensions no problem.  i was able to install the driver software for my Logitech MX1000 and it works no problem.  the next big test is going to be installing my McAfee 8 Enterprise.

My biggest gripe is probably the file navigation when you go to save a download or save a file inside of a program.  maybe for computer users who are not as tech-savvy as myself it might make sense, but since i am inherently familar with the abosulte paths of where files are located i find it annoying.

edit:  so i installed my antivirus software and it only took 2 tries.  some weird problem with the installer program and it not being compatible with Vista, and i got click happy and clicked quit somehow.  second try  work with out a problem

so maybe Microsoft is using some sort of new math, my system gets and overal rating of 3 but if you average the sub-catefories you get 4.8.  so shouldnt my system get a rating of at least a 4 or even just rounding it up to a 5 for good measure.  to me this just seems like some sort of ploy between pc manufacturers and microsoft to get you to buy new systems with nice new copies of vista.

Sounds like everyone is dealing with a mediocre distro of Linux!

Sounds like everyone is dealing with a mediocre distro of Linux!

Lol, you just HAVE to stir the pot don't you John? How about this, it's like we're dealing with a beta version of a Linux distro that's not due out until next year or so.

Think of the infancy of Xorg and it's 3D manipulation and the buggy Linux drivers for Nvidia and ATI cards back then...they had promise but they had to be tested and worked on. Same thing here. But as I said before, I'm using this everyday and it's my main OS at the moment. But I don't recommend that for everyone of course.

But a question I have to ask is: what do you think about it John? Or is it the topic of an upcoming article?

so maybe Microsoft is using some sort of new math, my system gets and overal rating of 3 but if you average the sub-catefories you get 4.8.  so shouldnt my system get a rating of at least a 4 or even just rounding it up to a 5 for good measure.  to me this just seems like some sort of ploy between pc manufacturers and microsoft to get you to buy new systems with nice new copies of vista.

From what I understand, the rating system is pretty controversial right now, and it may be up in the air as to if it stays in at all. It lists most of my components as as over 5, but for some reason it lists my 10,000 RPM Raptor HD as a 4.2! But what's the scale? A 4.2 out of 10? 100? I didn't see where that's explained.

For the moment, I'm taking the rating with a grain of salt.

well the 64-bit version seems to run marginally better than the 32-bit version on my system.  My system only gets a 3 on performance, but i dont remember what the breakdown on points was.  I think I have flaky drive in my system so this might be the cause of my problems.

I'm running an X2 4400 on an A8N-SLI with 2g ram and I've only gotten a "3." Kinda depressing. I have a 6600GT in the box, which I suspect may be keeping me from a 4.

No...no way. This is TOTALLY beta code here. They have at LEAST 6 months of bug fixing they have to do before this is ready for prime-time. Which will work out because they said that it's not suppose to be released until next February or so anyway, so that does give them time to bug-fix and build the OEM builds....if they work round the clock.

Last I'd read, Microsoft is planning to start selling shink-wrapped boxes in Jan or Feb, but is releasing final code to business customers in Nov.  I Finally got it installed on my spare PC yesterday; don't think I would be too eager to be an early corporate adopter.

Lol, you just HAVE to stir the pot don't you John?

I cannot imagine anyone with that kind of industry experience asking "So what do you think of Microsoft product ______ ?" and NOT realizing it was a loaded question.

We'll know for sure later, when people start getting release forms and Apple NDAs in email with a request to use their remarks in upcoming advertisements.

"Hi there, I'm a Macintosh."
"And I'm retarded!"

Still, what's ironic is that MS is such a slavishly customer-driven company. It amuses me to hear people gripe about being given what they asked for. "I asked for a tuna sandwhich! This has FISH in it!"

Apple has fanatics.
Linux has ex C128 owners.
MS has people who bitch less than everyone else.