WinHEC 2006 - Windows Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2

DougHolland — Tue, 23 May 2006 18:37:00 GMT

At the Microsoft WinHEC 2006 conference in Seattle today, Microsoft announced the release of the Beta 2 milestone binaries for both Windows Vista (Build 5384), Windows "Longhorn" Server (Build 5384), and Office 2007.

As I write this blog entry I'm downloading these binaries and will blog about the quality of these builds once I have had a chance to install them in the next day or so. One thing to note if you're planning on testing Windows Vista on an x64 platform you'll need a DVD burner capable of burning dual layer 8Gb DVD's as the .iso image for the x64 platform is just a touch above the 4.7Gb limit on conventional DVD's.

Update May 24, 2006 - NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 Device Driver Problems

I successfully downloaded both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows Vista Beta 2 last night and today installed the 32-bit version on my Dell Inspiron 9400 laptop which is equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 graphics card. The graphics driver for this device still causes the blue screen of death when I attempt to refresh the performance rating or run any application that uses the more impressive graphics characteristics of Windows Vista such as the new chess application. While I'm sure that NVIDIA will resolve these issues before Windows Vista RTM (release to manufacturing) I would have certainly liked these problems to have been solved for the Beta 2 milestone.

I'll therefore post some screenshots of Windows Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 using my workstation that uses an ATI graphics card instead, these should be available sometime on May 25th 2006.

Update May 25, 2006 - Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 2 Does Not Support Dual Booting Windows Vista Beta 2

So last night I installed Windows Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2 and life was being fairly good to me until I decided that I would install Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 2 onto the second hard drive within the workstation; unfortunately Windows Server "Longhorn" Beta 2 never presents me with a boot menu to enable me to get back to the Windows Vista Beta 2 installation. If anyone reading this knows how to customize the boot loader such that I can see both operating systems when I turn on the machine please e-mail me through this blog and let me know how to do this.

As such the screenshots that I'd previously promised will be slightly delayed while I resolve these issues.

Office 2007 User Interface

DougHolland — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 21:32:00 GMT

Jensen Harris of the Microsoft Office 2007 team has posted some screen shots of the kind of user interfaces we can all expect to be implementing after Microsoft ships the next version of Microsoft Office. According to his post we can also expect to see the applications that are part of Microsoft Office 2007 to support glass when running on Windows Vista with appropriate graphics hardware.

A New Look For Office 2007

C# Distilled : Microsoft Office 2007

WinHEC 2006 - Windows Vista Beta 2 and Office 2007 Beta 2

Office 2007 User Interface