A couple of weeks ago, I installed build 5384 of the second beta for Windows Vista. Yeah, you can find plenty of reviews on and screenshots from “credible websites” but I’ll post my findings from my point of view.
First, I’ll start with the installation. I wasn’t planning on wrecking my computers by installing Vista on them; relying on a beta for an OS isn’t up my alley. Instead, I created a VMware virtual machine for it. Microsoft makes Vista via a 3GB ISO that can be burned on a DVD. As such, the install is long and slow. Even by virtual machine standards, it took pretty frickin’ long.
What was nice to see during the installation process was a GUI. Gone is the DOS-y setup interface used to prepare drives and start the installation. Bye-bye blue screen, gray text, and yellow progress bars. After eons pass while Vista installs itself, you’re presented with a wizard-type setup for creating users and connecting to a network, much like in Windows XP. I sorta flew by this, as I was still in an impressed daze from the setup GUI.
Next, I’ll get into configuring Vista to my liking. Stay tuned.
4 Responses to "windows vista beta 2 impressions – part 1 of ?"
Does that build still take an hour or more to install? Still MS is taking more of the Mac features, their next step kill the registry :).
Yes, it still takes a long time to install. I guess it’s as fast as it’s gonna get, considering that’s 3GB worth of compressed stuff.
The registry is still there, though. Likely not to go away anytime soon. Developers are hooked on the Registry; I’m weening myself off of it for most projects where I would’ve stored something in the Registry. They can easily store user and global data in Application Data (now known as Program Data in Vista), but dev environments (ex: Windows API, .NET, etc.) make Registry methods so damn breezy to use instead of run o’ the mill file I/O. Maybe an XML-based API to get/set application data would do the trick, but that’s just my idea. I’m sure the Windows architects have though of something…I hope.
application data accessible via an XML api?! see os x 10.1… Actually Apple has turned application data back into binary since 10.4 which was super stupid. Luckilly you can still convert it back to xml with:
plutil -convert binary1 some_other_file.plist
So in OS X, is something like this possible?
Then at some point later on…
Or do you have to explicitly handle the file I/O and XML parsing? In that case, that classic INI style of would appeal to me. I’d rather deal with a hashtable than an XML doc anyday.
Note to Mac programmers: I’ve never ever coded for Mac OS X, so the above is pseudo-C code with variable initialization omitted and only a smidge of knowledge quickly found in Apple’s OS X API documentation. Don’t make fun of me 😉