Has anyone else tried Windows Vista Beta 2 yet? I installed it on a spare machine the other day and was impressed in several ways . . . both good and bad.

I liked the default theme quite a lot - very attractive and easy on the eyes, without being overbearing or too much eye candy. Other aspects of the interface, however, were less appealing. The sidebar is basically just a waste of space, and the re-structured Start menu (now just a Windows icon - guess they've had enough of the "start to shutdown" jokes) will at least require some getting used to (although it seems like it could be more useful than previous versions).

Wizards really seem to be the order of the day, as far as settings and configurations are concerned. I don't like that . . . seems cumbersome and slow when you only want to change one little thing. And the total lack of the usual "File - Edit - View - etc." menus in IE, Windows Explorer, and other applications is a bit disconcerting and confusing.

Overall, I'm inclined to upgrade from W2K to XP while I can, then let Vista go by for awhile. Some features seem good, but overall, it's more of a change than I want to go through.

How about anyone else?
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I haven't tried it, but have been reading the reviews, and talking to people who are beta testing it. One guy I talk to has been beta testing windows since 1995, he says he would rather use ME than Vista, which is saying a lot. I doubt I'd go that far.

It's funny that the things you don't like are almost all copies of something else, the sidebar is a copy of the new os x widget holder, the start icon is a copy of gnome/kde at least, maybe mac.

I would do what you suggest, move to windows xp to get the support, which should be good for about another 5 years or so, give or take. Windows xp and 2000 are both more or less fine operating systems that more or less do what they are supposed to do. But only if, and this is a big if, the user is reasonably competent and can avoid things like MSIE, spyware, viruses, and the like.

I still can't honestly recommend linux desktop to anyone other than power users who are able to get into their systems, or users who will never modify the initial install, much as I would love to be able to do so.

I can fairly safely say that I will never install vista on any machine I own, although I'm sure at some point I won't be able to avoid it with clients. XP convinced me that the path MS was following, and really most large commercial software, macromedia, norton, adobe, is not a path I have any interest in. That's endlessly tweaking and bloating out essentially mature products that were more or less completely done in 2000 or thereabouts.

I'm off windows completely except for 2, well 3, single applications I need for client purposes, and 1 I need once in a blue moon for myself.

There's been lots of interesting reading out there on vista, and most of it has been in this vein: I am not an anti windows reviewer, but I do not like what I am seeing in vista. That's on a technical level.
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