I started installing Windows Vista Beta 1 and Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2.

Day 1: I thought I’d install Vista inside VirtualPC. Bad idea; after several false starts and needing to implement a few strange workarounds from various blogs, I got it up and running, only to realize that the proper drivers are not yet available for Virtual PC hardware, meaning I had to run in a dramatically reduced (800×600) window, and due to lack of hardware acceleration, it was v-e-r-r-r-y … … s – l – o – w … So I bagged that and commandeered a newish PC.

Day 2: Reformatted the HD clean, and installed Vista Beta 1. Setup worked nicely, the install is quite clean with few choices to make along the way. It came up after a couple reboots during installation and we were off to the races.

My thoughts:

• The redesigned Explorer is a mess. Icons often appear as black rectangles, the various view interact and transition in strange and unexpected ways, and it’s generally a lot more cluttered than anything else I’ve worked with. It was so annoying that after my initial playing around with Vista, I’m putting it down for now. I’ll pick up the next release and see if it’s less headache-inducing more usable
• They competently aped the Mac OS X “Search within window” paradigm; this works nicely, eg. within Control Panel you can type “font” and it will filter the control panel applets down to those who deal with fonts. This is particularly helpful in light of the fact that the Control Panel ontology has gone through yet another round of obfuscation helpful re-organization.
• IE7 looks nice. Tabs, popup blocker, reasonable performance. Assuming Firefox stands still, this should stop people from fleeing from IE for the time being.