Can, just that I can't use aero glass. No lag or whatever problems. But XP boot screen is flickering... Note, it's XP boot screen... WEird huh...

Hope so. I don't wish to have flickering boot screen when the real vista is out. Maybe by time vista is officially launched, my laptop is not powerful enough. Btw, I heard that beta 2 is coming out on May 22. 

no really, windows 98 took almost 700 plus mb to install, windows xp took around 2gigs or so but i dont understand, vista needs 15gigs of free space?
what the hell is wrong with msoft?
its either its too bloated up or something is really wrong

I only required 8GB for 5381. 

Vista use lot of memory..need more than 512mb ..

I got a friend who has that...Later I would ask him , hows the new BETA 2 ...

BTW , as for me...VISTA is just a bloatware OS , that needs huge amount of HDD , huge amount of memory and SLi Graphics card. Without it , your computer would be like 300Mhz Pentium II , with 128MB RAM , 4MB VRAM with Windows XP...Dont get me wrong...Its soo much bloated..I would wait for SP1 to come out , and then later I would think about moving to VISTA. So far , XP does a great job. I am not getting this VISTA thingy , as who knows..It might contain Blaster Virus as well...Suddenly , bam restart

I would rather use Tiger...it only needs 256MB of RAM to run...Bah , it even runs fine on a 1999 PowerMac G3 with 512MB of RAM and on a 500Mhz G3 Processor....I would wait [and save $$$$$]

I woke up early today morning, so i could play around with the Beta 2 build, and here are my thoughts:

Installation on my slow Maxtor 15GB disk took roughly 1 hour 15mins from booting up the installer to finish. Faster than previous builds. They cleaned up the interface and looks pretty good. Total space (default@Vista Ultimate Edition) = 6.67GB + 2.3GB for the page file = ~ 10GB. You can change the pagefile size later on though, like I did to 1GB.

Boot times are impressive; pretty much like my primary Win XP installation. Performance has further improved (from the last build 5365 that I had). No sluggish menus, loads, , hdd thrashing, etc.  Bear in mind, that this is on my slower Maxtor 15Gb. If I install on the primary WD80GB, there shoud be further (though slight) loading benefits.

RAM usage = Heavy. Windows Classic theme @desktop with only the sidebar running (and other default services left on, untweaked) took up about 502MB of RAM. Changing to Windows Aero saw the usage go up to 680MB. Taskbar shows(with IE7 and 6 tabs open) RAM usage at roughly around 740MB. 2Gigs definately!

I don't like the default Start Menu options, though it is easily tweaked.
I'm gonna have to get used to the new default Explorer setup. Classic menus and folders is still available for those wondering.

For the ATI users, the Catalyst for Longhorn Beta 2 installs fine. Current driver revision adds Adaptive AA in the CCC options. Drivers (as before) show a GDI version of 9ex.

Might try some D3D and OGL demos on it later after lunch. 

normal minima memory requirements for high end games = 1GB

best performance = 2gb