Diary of a Wolfeman

I seem to be encountering a lot of beta software lately, so I figured I may as well go whole hog and started a download of the latest Vista beta release.

Mind you MS may be calling it a Release Candidate, but it is most assuredly still a beta release – and will stay that way, in my not-so-humble opinion, until Service Pack1 is built for it – at which point it will become a launch product. If history repeats, Vista SP2 will make it stable.

I will take a moment here to advise any who are thinking of partaking of the recent “Buy a computer now and get a free Vista Upgrade” program to NOT do so. Just wait until you can get it pre-installed if you absolutely must have Vista. M$ upgrades have NEVER worked right, and you will only bring yourself grief.

As for me, I’m going to pick up another hard drive and not even try to dual-boot Vista, I’ll just use my swap bays. The rest of the hardware in Hyperion (my desktop) is more than capable of handling the advanced features, so this will be my first chance to see it running live. Yeah, I’ve seen tons of screenshots, but it ain’t the same as having your paws on the keyboard.

As I run it through its paces, I’ll do my best to break it so the rest of you will know what to watch for. I’m expecting to run into problems with my media collection due to content licensing, and I am also figuring on there being issues with software installation. We’ll see just how well their “limited user” accounts function.

For this test, I will be using the 32-bit version. I figure I will deal with just one beta at a time, and last I looked there was still a scarcity of 64-bit drivers. If the 32-bit works out ok, I’ll re-burn it with the 64-bit build.

Wheeee.