Re: A Huge Suggestion To Those Wanting To Test Vista
I thought I would expand a little bit on this thread.
I was a beta tester for Windows Vista, since well before the 'Beta' was actually released, and I am very confident in saying that due to the complexity of Windows Vista, there isn't a VM (Virtual Machine) enviroment out there that could maximize the performance of vista. While it is possible to install vista on a virtual machine (I've done it), I had a lot of issues that didn't happen when I had installed it on a real machine.
Microsoft has taken the liberty to explicitly state in Vista's ToS, that it can not be install on any virtualization enviroments at the current time. So even if you wanted to install Vista on VMWare, you would be breaking the Terms Of Service, and most likely wouldn't be getting the real experience from Vista.
One disclaimer I would like to make to this thread as well, is that people should not be confused about what a 'Beta' is. A 'Beta' is a piece of software that is not complete. Because of this, it will generally run much slower than the real product, because of the debugging features that are enabled, and will likely have many issues that you will not see in the final release. Now that the full version of Vista is released, the newer version will run a lot cleaner than any of the betas that were released before. People should be very skeptical of anyone that stated that it is a 'worse' operating system than XP. Since Vista is a new product, it is unlikely that many things will have drivers for it (although currently, my only problem is my video card), and is not intended for everyone to upgrade right away. I would give the OS 6 months before switching if you are not into 'testing' software for stability, to allow the hardware manufactors to start producing stable drivers.
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