finally had time to try out Vista beta 5308

[sugo]

I tired one over the weekend on a T42 with Aero glass and side bar turned on. A few observations:

- All hardware drivers automatically installed during setup except IBM PM Device and Modem. I hope IBM will provide a Vista driver for the power management device.
- The installation occupies about 7GB+ of HDD space.
- After boot, memory consumption is already at 450MB+ with no user application running. After running and closing a few apps, it shot up to 600MB+. In XP it was in 150/200MB range.
- Video (tried MPEG2 and DivX) playback is fairly slow with dropped frames. It's like running a 300MHz Pentium II. Hopefully the ATI driver will have significant improvements.

[GomJabbar]

I tired one

Video (tried MPEG2 and DivX) playback is fairly slow with dropped frames. It's like running a 300MHz Pentium II.

It does sound pretty tired.

- The installation occupies about 7GB+ of HDD space.

That's over 2 orders of magnitude larger than the OS in the days of DOS. I dare say it's likely over 2 orders of magnitude larger than Windows 3.0.

[dsvochak]

If sugo's experience is close to what is normal, it's now definite that I'm not interested in vista.

[TonyJZX]

Betas are usually quite bloated and resource hungry.

I see no reason why Vista Starter will not run on a reasonably memory upgraded T20, eg. 384Mb ram.

You're on your own if you want to run the advanced editions.

[Rob Mayercik]

- The installation occupies about 7GB+ of HDD space.
- After boot, memory consumption is already at 450MB+ with no user application running. After running and closing a few apps, it shot up to 600MB+. In XP it was in 150/200MB range.

I hope to heck that the 7GB is due to the debugging options having been turned on at compile time. Otherwise, in the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, they've got some 'splaining to do.

Maybe it's just my background as an embedded software engineer, but the idea that of an operating system that requires 7GB of hard disk space is very difficult to understand. How big does that mean the install set will be? Or the installed size of the final version?

And as to betas being bloated, that isn't always the case - I got a copy of the "June Test Beta" of Windows 95 many years ago from a friend when I was in college. Ran it for six months, and it performed very well on the 486DX33 I had at the time. I think the first official Win95 release may have even been slightly larger than the beta I ran (been too long). The thought of the released Vista being bigger than this Beta is a frightening thought.

[BoomAM]

As has been said, the memory usage isnt really an issue for MS at the moment, i presume, like alot of developers, that they'll concentrate on getting it fully working before cutting out the bulk.