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that's a most excellent idea to ensure that vista will not mess up your existing windows installation.
my two cents about vista:
i downloaded the ISO last week, burned the dvd, then installed it in a dual-boot setup on my main box after creating a second primary partition on the main hard drive.
the install went smooth. it took about an hour on a p4 3.0ghz w/1 gig ram. the dual-boot worked correctly.
first impressions:
looks - microsoft is trying to compete with apple by attempting to create a slick and pretty UI. however, vista is a cheap, uninspired and unoriginal knock-off. even worse, the amount of resources it requires to pull off this imitation is ridiculous.
security - windows continues to make the same mistakes. while vista contains under-the-hood improvements and changes regarding security, it is still on the same road of creating an insecure OS and then trying to patch it afterwards with poor attempts. in vista's case, these attempts are unbelievably annoying by bombarding the user with confusing dialog boxes and forcing the user to make a decision, which will be most likely uneducated, by taking away control until he does. it also denies access to parts of the OS and generally makes life unnecessarily difficult, causing users either to get frustrated with it or forcing them to circumvent security, boycotting the whole purpose.
usability - while the UI contains a few new niceties, it also unnecessarily changes some things or makes access to some things more difficult than in xp without an obvious reason.
hardware requirements - the hardware specs required to run vista smoothly are truly ridiculous. the majority of current computers will barely be able to run vista or not at all unless in a crippled mode. the main thing vista will accomplish is make people spend money on an OS they don't need and then spend more money on new hardware so they can run it.
featureset - vista does not contain a single major feature that makes it worth the upgrade - period. the only new noticeable thing for the average consumer is the UI and that's it. there is absolutely nothing that justifies the extreme upgrade expense, both software and hardware.
while it comes with more bundled software and a new version of IE with "new" features, none of it is new. all such features and software can already be had for xp, most of it better and free or cheaper. the new features in IE are a sad attempt at keeping up with firefox by imitating some of its features that should have been added to IE 5 years ago.
DRM - vista includes several new digital rights management features such as HDCP that limit consumers even more to what they can and cannot do with their own computer and media. another step back and another attempt at the industry trying to control the consumer.
drivers - vista failed to recognize and properly install the promise fastrak controller and crystal-fusion based hercules soundcard in my system, both common items that are a few years old but by no means legacy products. when i finally managed to install the sound drivers, the system bluescreened repeatedly. not a big deal since this is a beta, but the hardware should have been supported out of the box.
conclusion:
very, very disappointing. vista has absolutely nothing of value to offer. it is xp with a incredibly bloated and useless UI. its features are mediocre imitations of functionality already available today and done better by other software / OSs.
after poking around in vista for a few days i promptly uninstalled it and went back to xp, which is stable and equipped with good third-party software that lets me do what i want to do.
if it wasn't for my moderate gaming habit, i would not be running windows anymore at this point. when i upgrade my desktop in the near future it will continue to run xp. however, when my laptop comes due for replacement, it will most likely be replaced with an apple laptop.
at this point one can only hope that vista turns out to be a huge flop and that microsoft finally realizes that it is time to wake up and change direction.
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