Friday, July 29, 2005

The Horn of Plenty?

Recently (like most of the rest of the IT universe) I've been playing with Windows Vista™ Beta 1 build 5112. The OS formerly known as LongTime, ah, I mean LongHorny, er make that Longhorn. Actually, they might as well have kept the name since IT geeks like me keep working with it until the cows come home.

A couple of cohorts and I have tried it on about 7 different hardware types so far. We've seen a couple of blue screens, some installs of various programs that make Vista reboot over and over, some annoyingly large icons on the desktop (that are nigh impossible to shrink down to regular old 32x32 size) and a virtual plethora (yes, that's for you Steph - think I wasn't paying attention to your presentation? Call my picture stuffy and get razzed, right?) of other issues both minor and major.

So far the biggest let down has just been the lack of features. You name it and feature X is shipping in the "Beta 2 timeframe". That and I think I'd kill for a working VPN client about now. Oh, and maybe some Anti-Virus that works - right, that would be good.

So I brought a notebook home running Beta1 to show off (damn, I'm a geek) and my wife and kids got that "oh, no, here he goes again" expression on their faces and came up with any excuse to get the heck away from me and the shiny new OS. You know, the "I have to take the garbage out", or the "I had better go do my homework." Is it just me, or could it have been the large icons that scared them off?

So - good experiences with Beta1? Bad ones? I'll be reading about them and publishing more of the things I run across here.

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