Yesterday night, microsoft released a public beta of vista. Once downloaded, it will give you 2 licenses which are good for up to 10 computers each. The licences will last for one year.

They have a high demand right now and are bogged down, but you can try later at this address:

http://download.windowsvista.com/pre...6/download.htm

Tell us your thoughts of the beta.

Also, you can get a 1 year beta of office 2007 as well to test out.

It's a bit early so the jury's not out on this yet, but so far I'm liking it. I've set it up dual boot with my existing Win XP pro install.

The UAC (User Account Control) is a great idea for security in theory but Vista's implementation is aweful. I disabled it after about 2 extremely annoying minutes.

The 'Search' is very cool. When I found that Defrag wasn't in the Computer Management console, rather than tunnel thru all the menus to get to system tools, i simply typed defrag in the search and it launched it for me. Defrag's been improved too, u can schedule a time for it to run automatically.

http://www.my-etrust.com has a free antivirus for Vista.

nVidia has new drivers for Vista.

Now if it'll only handle my kid's games....

Later

*waiting the 6 hours for the download* heh its crazy...buut, ill be trying a dual boot on a laptop, so we'll see.

See my DaniWeb blog entry here for some more detail about the Longhorn Beta 3 release.