Sand-Man
18-04-2006, 06:48 PM
Incase the title was a bit confusing, Microsoft released Beta 2 Build 5342 of Windows Vista around the 23 of March this year. Now I got my copy of Windows Vista through the magical ways that no one knows of (sarcasam), and I must say its a bit nicer that previous builds (beta 1 builds in particular).
The GUI skin is still based on transparencies, but they have changed a few things. I will admit that it is XP looking but more shiney etc. And I like it actually, and it seems many other people due to considering how popular Vista Themes are in the Theme XP community. People that have played around with it also know that Microsoft has done away with the word "My" in Windows Vista. You now just have "Computer" and "Network". It also seems Vista is geared around people being able to "Personalize" their OS to suit them better. Hence why there is no more properties box, its now "Personalize".
This whole concept is even brought out in the fact Microsoft has included much more theme color changing ability built in. You don't have only the classic blue/green, olive, and silver/green to choose from. It seems the sucess of sites like themexp has influenced Microsoft to make their new OS's more customizable and full of eye candy.
There are other little neat features like a window preview when you roll over your minimized windows. So incase you have a ton of windows open you can roll over them to see little preview windows. Also some programs like Paint have been improved allowing to save to extensions such as TIFF etc now. I have yet to mess with the "3d flip view" style aspects of the OS, and I only have the 32bit beta (haven't found a 64bit version of the new build).
Now if your not one of the many people that don't like the idea of Windows Vista and actually want to play with it, don't get it unless will be running two operating systems. I have Windows XP Professional Corporate edition on my SATA drive, and I keep Vista on my backup PATA drive. It has many compatability issues (but I found out it would run Doom 3 oddly enough) so don't plan on getting all your programs to work on it. Also currently it is avaliable only in a 14 day trial, and the little program to bypass activation doesn't seem to work.
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/450/vistabob9za.jpg
The GUI skin is still based on transparencies, but they have changed a few things. I will admit that it is XP looking but more shiney etc. And I like it actually, and it seems many other people due to considering how popular Vista Themes are in the Theme XP community. People that have played around with it also know that Microsoft has done away with the word "My" in Windows Vista. You now just have "Computer" and "Network". It also seems Vista is geared around people being able to "Personalize" their OS to suit them better. Hence why there is no more properties box, its now "Personalize".
This whole concept is even brought out in the fact Microsoft has included much more theme color changing ability built in. You don't have only the classic blue/green, olive, and silver/green to choose from. It seems the sucess of sites like themexp has influenced Microsoft to make their new OS's more customizable and full of eye candy.
There are other little neat features like a window preview when you roll over your minimized windows. So incase you have a ton of windows open you can roll over them to see little preview windows. Also some programs like Paint have been improved allowing to save to extensions such as TIFF etc now. I have yet to mess with the "3d flip view" style aspects of the OS, and I only have the 32bit beta (haven't found a 64bit version of the new build).
Now if your not one of the many people that don't like the idea of Windows Vista and actually want to play with it, don't get it unless will be running two operating systems. I have Windows XP Professional Corporate edition on my SATA drive, and I keep Vista on my backup PATA drive. It has many compatability issues (but I found out it would run Doom 3 oddly enough) so don't plan on getting all your programs to work on it. Also currently it is avaliable only in a 14 day trial, and the little program to bypass activation doesn't seem to work.
http://img299.imageshack.us/img299/450/vistabob9za.jpg