Been spending a little time with Vista beta 2 and have, so far, been pretty pleased.  It’s still a bit early to know if I can use it for my day-to-day work but I can report that most of what I need to use is installed and working.  Here’s what I’ve seen so far.

Applications I have tried:

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The URGE inclusion with Media Player 7 is awesome.  Within minutes of being up and running in Vista, I was watching videos of the ACM award winners with my credit card nowhere in sight.

At one point during my first day with Vista I used the Microsoft Update site to download an updated network driver.  As it was installing, I actively refused to start any other apps knowing that I was about to reboot my system.  After a bit I became distracted by some emails and IRC conversations and then noticed that my IRC client had gone offline and that the music I was streaming from URGE had stopped.  I poked around inside media player attempting to find out the problem.  In a few moments the network resumed and assumed it was just some really nasty network congestion.  And then I saw this dialog:

The update that was successfully installed was my network driver.  Yes, yes, I know that Linux has done this for years but it’s good to see that Vista is  finally capable of this sort of update.