Well after a morning of installing Windows Vista Beta 2 (build 5384.4) I can safely say that I am impressed by the end result. I am running it on a IBM Thinkpad T40p, which has a built in ATi Mobilty Radeon 9000 videocard that does not support the Aero Glass mode. On first boot I found that 2 devices were not installed, my wireless controller and the Thinkpad PM Device (whatever that is?) they were both marked as unknown devices but after selecting ‘Update drivers’ and ‘Search online for drivers’ they were both installed meaning I have a completely installed system on Vista Beta 2.

I have not seen any significant lag on my 1.6GHz Intel M with 1 GB of Ram even though I have a Windows System Performance Rating of just 1! I am getting the UAP popups everynow and then but it seems to me that Microsoft has further improved this by only getting prompted for system critical issues. It doesn’t feel like an annoyance yet so I will wait before I go and disable it.

Hopefully the dinner with Jim Allchin last night will mean that our concerns for non-glass capable machines (like this one) might get a better theme than the one that shipped with Beta 2. It plain sucks and I told him last night when I was there, he seemed to take it on-board and wrote reminder notes for himself on this very subject.

At the moment Tom Warren is at the Gaming Zone competing on AMD Gamer PC’s with Halflife 2 Deathmatch. If he wins he’ll get one of the machines the competition is being held on, there are prizes for second and third place and I think he’ll do well enough to fill one of those spots.

I am going to fiddle a bt more with this build and wait for neowin.net to come back up with the new Shift design