Vista Beta 2
Jarod | August 30, 2006With so many sites showing Windows Vista screenshots – the RC 1 can be expected soon – and the Mac fanboys waving their flame swords, I thought I’d give it a try, too. Since I don’t have a PC at hand I could use (more like dare) for a standard install, I tried installing it on Virtual PC and Virtual Server. I even got me the latest beta of Virtual Machine Additions. It installed alright, and in Safe Mode it even runs acceptably. However, don’t think of running it in Normal Mode with the Glass themes on a VPC – I didn’t even manage to make the Start Menu unfold, it’s so incredibly slow. Do any of you have some experience how to speed it up or is it absolutely useless, with the bad graphics driver emulation and stuff?
By the way, I also tried the Office 2007 Beta. Some of the standard apps like Word really look different now, clean, much more workflow oriented. Totally new way to access the menus – it’s a lot easier to find what you need in the options screens. It’s all in the same line as the new IE7. We should expect to need time for the adjustment, though. I liked it so far.
From what little i know of windows vista, not read much into it asside from a few articles on the IET magazines, it draws upon the power of gfx cards. If the hardware isnt present it tries software emulation.
Software emulation of gfx functions is only usefull for software design and testing, its useless for real time applications.
It needs access to a gfx card.
Emulation wont cut it, there so obsessed with eye candy that the thing actualy needs access to the inbuilt hardware functions of a gfx card to run.
Sorry for shutting you out there mate, with so much spam I had to tighten the rules for comments.
The one thing I wonder is, there are people out there stating they run it on a vitual machine with not so much of a problem.
This MS guy, for example: http://blogs.msdn.com/mikekol/archive/2006/07/27/680836.aspx
I wondered what had happened to those 2 posts. When I logged into the control panel I saw the Spam protection thing and didn’t give it a second thought.
On the matter at hand… I try not to read stuff posted by MS people. Most times they try to hard to sound technical and just end up confusing the issue.
Hardware emulation is slow, that’s all there is to it. If you try to run it on a single core computer you hit severe processing lag.
If you have a multi core system (and the operating system is smart enough to use it) you can shift such tasks into separate processors in which case it might work. Dedicated hardware is more efficient but CPU’s have considerably more “brute force”.
That’s one possibility anyway.