Beta 2 came out yesterday and I've had a chance to install and play with it. This build is certainly an improvement over the last one I tried. Everything seems more fluid. One of the major issues I'm noticing is the RAM requirement. The system I'm testing it on has 768MB of RAM. Vista uses more than half that (about 400MB) just sitting there. Doing nothing. Part of this has to do with the resolution I'm running at (1600x1200) and the amount of video memory (128MB) I have to drive it. The system uses less RAM when I scale it down to 1280x960. Anything less than that uses the same amount of RAM (about 300MB). I imagine RAM usage would be somewhere around that mark if I were using a video card with 256 or 512MB of video memory.
Driver support is up from the last release, though some hardware emulation driver (like Daemon Tools) don't work properly. I'm loving the new start menu. There's a bar at the bottom that works as a combination between "Run" and "Search". Typing in "paint" launches Paint. Typing in "civ" launches Civilization 4. Typing in a URL launches it in Firefox (my default browser). The strange "metasearches" that were in the start menu in the last version have been removed.
My only real recommendations for Vista include plenty (1GB minimum for normal usage) of RAM and a video card with at least 128MB of VRAM.
Feel free to field any further questions. Attached is a screenshot including my system specs.
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C:Serverxampphtdocszopharoldwwwthreadsattachmentsvista.jpg
Driver support is up from the last release, though some hardware emulation driver (like Daemon Tools) don't work properly. I'm loving the new start menu. There's a bar at the bottom that works as a combination between "Run" and "Search". Typing in "paint" launches Paint. Typing in "civ" launches Civilization 4. Typing in a URL launches it in Firefox (my default browser). The strange "metasearches" that were in the start menu in the last version have been removed.
My only real recommendations for Vista include plenty (1GB minimum for normal usage) of RAM and a video card with at least 128MB of VRAM.
Feel free to field any further questions. Attached is a screenshot including my system specs.
<P ID="signature">
C:Serverxampphtdocszopharoldwwwthreadsattachmentsvista.jpg