Aqua-Soft ForumsIt's been released to beta testers today. Build # is 5308 and word from Microsoft is that it is indeed Feature Complete.
Neowin has the story and PCMag has some screenshots
Windows Vista February CTP out
thank's... some new features looking really good
Wow this looks like it's going to be a really cool build! Thanks for the info!
5308 is the build that will make all of you Mac users wish you had a PeeCee 
5308 is the build that will make all of you Mac users wish you had a PeeCee
By the looks of this CTP, I'm trying to rush to the Mac side...
By the looks of this CTP, I'm trying to rush to the Mac side...
ROFL
Same here 
While it has some nice touches, we should all remember that Vista isn't competing against Tiger (which already surpasses it) but with Leopard and we know nothing of that beast
Vista looks cool
i notice on one of the screenshots, a computer with P4 2.8Ghz, 2GB ram, 128MB Nvidia 5200 graphics card only has performance score of 2 (outa 10 or 5?), anyone know the minimum system requirement to run Vista? looks like u need a decent machine to run it.
time for me to upgrade to Opteron 165, 2GB ram, better video card
Isn't 5 years and all BG's money enough to hire a good team of icon designers and replace that damn ugliness once and for all? Seems we'll be seing all those '95 icons all over the system untill the day Oracle buys Microsoft and closes it for good :-
Looks like the programmers had more say in the design then designers did if you ask me.
time for me to upgrade to Opteron 165, 2GB ram, better video card
Uhu... or to a SGI's Altix 4700? That'd be the right resource pack for a resource hog such as Vista...
Looks like the programmers had more say in the design then designers did if you ask me.
What makes you say that?
Obviously U haven't seen the screenshots, Sid.. lol ...
Frankly Speaking... I feel that, in order to make Vista visually attractive M$ went overboard with design. I mean they have tried to make everything shiny and glossy and glowy and yet when put together it doesn't look as appealing as out-of-the-box Mac OSX !!
Am I the only one who could care less about how Vista looks?
"We" can fix that later... I care about how well it works.
So far I'm impressed with what's been done under the hood, screw the paint job.
I agree with ya
As rjohnstone said, I'm more interested in the behavior. That's why I'm not too fond of screenshots--they don't let you interact with anything. We're accomplished enough to mod the GUI if we don't like it--I'm concerned with features now!
-NC
Yeah, for the people that REALLY care how our desktops look, we're going to do something about it. Vista's going to be modded to hell and back-- to look like a mac! (of course)
That said, the default look of a product really reflects on the quality as a whole. M$ was kinda screwed in that Tiger looks so... great. They can't blatantly copy, so they had to go "outside the box" into uglyville. Transparency is gimmicky enough to please the masses I suppose.
I can't think of a better design/look than mac's, and it looks like Microsoft couldn't either. Maybe they should have a GUI contest? Maybe A-S should have themed GUI/skin/mock-up contests to push the bounds of visual creativity.
Oh well... yes, I do agree that What's under the hood is definitely important than how good hood looks. But yeh, You definitely like to a drive a car that both looks and runs good.
Anyway, as always it's not a big deal cause we all are going to rip the hood off and mod it to T to make it look like mac again... .. so that's taken care of... lol.
But sometimes I feel bad, that M$ had been working on Vista for so long.. and it's very much visible that Visual Part of vista was given great deal of attention in the developement. Yet, people (specially loonies like us) are gonna turn it to OSX look eventually... sorry, Bill.. but it's vicious circle !!
Updated Intel® Graphics WDDM drivers supporting the Intel® 945G Express Chipset are included in the Windows Vista* February CTP build (build 5308). These drivers are only compatible with this build and should not be used with other versions of Windows Vista.
Glad to see Intel finally get off their butts and write a set of video drivers for Vista.
@everyone: Please remember that the average Joe computer user probably has no clue what Vista looks like. Chances are high that most people (tech enthusiasts apart) will be blown away by what Vista has to offer (at least GUI-wise).
i kind of like the vista look... i guess i'm a minority here... like the eskimos
I installed Vista on my main (and only) pc, with a AMD Athlon 1.2 Ghz processor, 320mb of RAM, and a piece of crap internal video set. Install took about 3 hours, and it ran a little slow, but the interface was, in one incoherant word, blourgh. It was clunky, I had just the basic set up, no areo, but still, I was unimpressed. Im hoping that this build is better suited for low-end PC's like mine.
I installed Vista on my main (and only) pc, with a AMD Athlon 1.2 Ghz processor, 320mb of RAM, and a piece of crap internal video set. Install took about 3 hours, and it ran a little slow, but the interface was, in one incoherant word, blourgh. It was clunky, I had just the basic set up, no areo, but still, I was unimpressed. Im hoping that this build is better suited for low-end PC's like mine.
What did you expect?
Your PC is a POS... Vista detects that and only loaded the basics.
Most of the enhanced GUI features will not even work unless you have a video card that is in the current HCL for Vista. Trust me, that list is small right now as most video cards are not DX10 certified.
And M$ already stated that they are not coding for backward compatibility or the abilty to run on older hardware. It costs too much money and there are way to many variables.
If it runs on your old PC... great. If not... to bad.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvi...e/vistarpc.mspx
as you said before, the most important thing is "is this windows version working better than the last one?"... honestly i hope it works better if not, my next new computer will be an intel mac. 