Windows Vista B1 + VPC = Happy Geoffy
So everyone's seen the news now that Windows Vista Beta 1 is available for those in the Longhorn Beta program and to MSDN Universal subscribers.
Being one of the latter, the first thing I did yesterday when I found out was to kick off the download and get myself some Longhorn action!
The download finished last night, but due to extenuating circumstances (read: My folks are visiting at the moment, and the spare room is also the computer room) I had to wait until today to give it a shot.
After burning it off to save space on my overcrowded hard drive, I created a new VPC image and installed longhorn into it. I've seen around the traps some people mentioning issues with the hard drive when using this beta in VPC, but to me it really didn't seem to be a problem. I created a new partition within the vhd, formatted it, and then rebooted the image. Second time around, everything was fine.
It's a little strange that the installer can't tell that this newly created partition is now quite usable (I think it's something to do with only supporting NTFS), but I'm sure the kinks will be ironed out along the way before RTM.
The install took hours. This is no surprise though - I've only got an Athlon 2400 with half a gig of ram, and I only allocated it 250 meg.
When it was done and actually booted into windows, I was stuck with 4 color 800x600 display. A quick (read: slow :) install of the VPC VM additions and we're all good to go:
As you can see in the picture, I've got Longhorn going, Aero is enabled, and I'm blogging from within my VPC image. w00t!
Which brings me to my first compatabilty bug. As you can also see in the image (if you're familiar with Community Server) I'm not getting the fancy freetextbox type editing experience. Raw HTML only. Someone's not reading the user-agent strings for IE7 right *grin*
So now my playing is really going to start.
I'm excited :)