Saturday, July 15, 2006

Vista Beta 2 - Will I Like It?

So, my Windows install has started doing some very funky things. Live Messenger refuses to run, even after an install, as does Money 2006. The Sims 2 has started to randomly lock up when it loads things (such as families, lots, etc). Overall Windows XP is just acting weird, and making me mad. So I'm formatting.

I'd really like to switch to 100% non-Microsoft in the house, but things like The Sims 2 are keeping me from doing just that. All of my machines are running Ubuntu 6.06 (in the case of my servers and my remote desktop machine thanks to FreeNX), and my wife's computer is the Mac OSX machine (which is the machine I'm currently writing this post on).

So, I can't find my Windows XP install disc. I've got this copy of Windows Vista Beta 2 laying here that I signed up for but never installed, so I think I'm going to give it a shot. My hardware isn't brand-spanking new by any means, but it's generic at least. Realtek, Soundmax, ATI, AMD, and ASUS are the parts that are in my main box, so even Vista shouldn't have an issue. Ubuntu never has, so this should be interesting.

About the only special things I need Vista to do correctly is play games, mostly from The Zone and other websites like Yahoo! (my wife loves those games), and Sims 2. If it does that without giving me a fit, I may upgrade to Vista when it comes out. In reality, if WINE is up to snuff and running DirectX by that time, I'll probably be using Linux, or I'll have another Mac in the house to replace my Windows machine.

I'll be using Vista for as long as I can stomach it, and get back to everyone on how it runs.

If nothing else, the install program is pretty.

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