A Beta w/a side of Whine.
Well among other things this past week I got vista and Office Beta loaded onto a test system. This is on top of an SBS 2003 R2 beta that I've been running over the past couple of weeks.
SBS2K3 R2 has been on a system for quite a while. Unlike some people I don't have copious amounts of quality hardware laying around for testing on. I do have an older PIII 700 w/512 of RAM, It was running Windows 2003 so I loaded it up with Virtual Server, and started the install of the SBS R2 beta. Bad move. I've loaded SBS2k3 on virtual server before, as a test/model system and in the past it went pretty darn well. While slow, it did load successfully and allow some testing on it. This time, though, the R2 beta would not load, no matter what I did to it in the Virtual Machine. So I backed up my system 'test system' and loaded up the SBS2K3 R2 Beta and sure enough it loaded. It was still slow as Molases in winter in Maine, but I've been able to build a pretty good little 'alternative' network out of it.
The Vista beta has been wonderful. I loaded it up on a wowefully underpowered old HP Pavilion. it's only saving grace is it has 512 RAM and a decent AMD processor. This was an inherited box from a customer discard, so I had nothing to loose. It loaded up fine, although I don't get Aero :-( <sad> it still runs pretty well. One feature I really like is the USB SWAP file! Now that IS COOL with a capital C!!! As Monty Burns would say, egssalent, accomanied by an evil, meniacle grin. It's only been loaded for a couple of days and already it's made quite an impression. I think they've actually managed to re-engineer a Mac. :-> <grin>
The Office Beta...what can I say, but...
AAAARRRRGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!
If I can get it to ever work, it looks like a bust-up product. I downloaded the Office Pro Plus installer from the Office preview site, but I have yet to make it work on the vista machine. I may put it on a spare XP machine, but then again maybe not. I really want to see some of the additional features of running Vista and Office 2007 together. If I ever get that going I may post some pics, and some stories, until then whine, whine, whine.