gogogadgetearl

2006.04.16

• so...i got a *legit* copy of windows vista beta 2 [build 5308] recently, and i decided to toy with it a little this weekend.  i dropped a 2nd hard drive in my home machine and went to town on the installation.  it installed, booted, and i played with it for a good day or two.
  
  i realized after restarting the machine once or twice, that it doesn't give me the option to boot into my original Windows XP installation.  no biggie, i figure i'll just disconnect the 2nd HD (with vista on it), and then it'll default to my original XP install.
  
  well, that didn't happen.  halfway thru the XP bootup, i get a blue screen (not the infamous BSOD, just a plain blue screen) that says, "STOP: c0000218 Unkown Hard Error".  crap.  i reconnected the vista HD, and booted back into it.  after a few google searches i realized that somehow the vista installation corrupted my XP registry.  oi.
  
  ironically, vista is the only working OS on my machine right now.  as a matter of fact, i'm actually typing this post in vista [screen].
  
  so, what's my impression of vista?  in short: vista is going to be a great OS -- the minor functionality additions, the MAJOR security and stability fixes, and all the wonderful eye candy is really going to make it well worth the buy.  however, in the beta, it's still sort of a mish-mash of new prettyness with a few old XP images and icons, surprisingly secure [running at a non-admin user level by default], iffy on stability [hey - it's a beta!], and in dire need of a performance boost [it's terribly sluggish on my AMD3200-64/1GB RAM/NVIDIA 5900XT-128MB].