Two hours lasting Windows Longhorn beta test

From: Kaoru Saotome (Kaoru_at_somewhere.org)
Date: 03/11/05 

Date: Fri, 11 Mar 2005 21:13:26 GMT

Sorry it`s a bit long here is abstract:
- this is my personal test of a new Longhorn beta downloaded from
newsgroups this week (4171 i think)
- installer has problems with mice detection
- GUI has better effects, explorer looks nicer, feels like it runs bit
faster, some things are polished but the improvement against XP is
quite small
- two ideas "stolen" from KDE and Gnome
- nforce2 chipset devices and an USB HP 3325 printer - no drivers
available
- incompatibility with windows xp driver installers from nvidia

Full text:

I have found a new(er) Longhorn build cd on newsgroups this week so I
thought I will give it a try, since I had an old version of Longhorn
on my pc before and wanted to know what`s new in Redmond.

I have two harddrives and one is empty at the moment - this harddrive
was formatted in Suse as FAT32, the other one has Suse 9.2, but thats
not important now.

When I ran the Longhorn installer, which is faster and better looking
than in the first beta, i realized that the installer did not
recognize my PS/2 mice! I have run through the installer using
keyboard and after copying and reboot, there was no boot sequence on
the harddrive. So I launched the setup again to remove the fat32
partition (since the readme recommended to use ntfs) and wanted to
format the disk as ntfs. I was not able to move with tab key (the mice
doesn`t work neither) to the "remove" button so I have pressed the
combination "alt+r" which worked and the partition was removed
successfully. However, I couldn`t reach new partition nor format
option with tab so I tried the combination of underscored letters
"alt+n" and "alt+f" i think - but none worked! So I had to shutdown
the computer and reboot to the other beta of Longhorn since my old
copy of Windows XP is non bootable and I was way tooo lazy to look for
my Partition Magic floppy.

So I have run the old Longhorn beta, ran the install process and when
I saw that the drive got formatted to NTFS i pressed the reset button
which was a mistake since the new Longhorn has shown a blue screen
with lots of output (typical win 2000 & xp debug blue screen). So next
time i did not hurry that much and the installation worked fine after.

The Longhorn looks like Windows XP with Style XP theme. The new
Internet Explorer and Explorer look interesting, the shadows and
effects in GUI look very good. The system felt like running quite
fast. Some things were improved, some things were simplified both in
good and bad sense (like hardware manager, no serious information
inside). I don`t want to talk much about some imperfections since this
is a development version which noone should see, but there were two
things which i saw which were clearly "stolen" from Linux, both KDE
and Gnome. From KDE, the function when you place your cursor over a
picture and you see instantly a large thumbnail with description. From
Gnome was taken the system of surfing directories - ie when you are in
/home/user/Documents you see three "buttons", one is "home", second is
"user" and third is "documents" and when you click through it, you go
up and down in the directory structure. I have never seen these thing
somewhere else, but I might be wrong about this.

Why only two hours? Well, the windows installation has not recognized
my sound card, network card on my nForce2 nor HP 3325 printer!
Graphics card (Geforce FX 5600) worked fine btw but no tv out of
course. When I tried to install Xp drivers i failed even after i tried
the Windows XP compatibility mode. What i have ended up was a system
without sound card and a single useable program. The partition is gone
and I`m back on my good old Suse. <s> 

--
KS