Since I had no suitable machine at home, I chose to install Vista Beta 2 on a PC at my school, where I am the technology coordinator. There a variety of users would test it out for me, perhaps unwillingly, for the next academic year. [Note: The Beta 2 version expires on June 1, 2007.]

Keep reading to follow the ever-continuing saga of my trying out Vista. Microsoft recommends a PC with at least an 800 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and video card compatible with DirectX 9.0. We have several of these at my school, all whiteboxes purchased in 2002. To come up with a suitable PC, however, I had to reconfigure one.

Two of these whiteboxes had died during the previous year, one from power supply failure and the other from hard drive failure. A third was freed up this summer because of office reshufflings, so I grabbed 128 MB of RAM from each of the dead machines (which I will fix up later) to bring the working unit to the recommended 512 MB.

That operation complete, it was time to start the PC, load the DVD in the drive, and reboot (with the PC disconnected from the LAN). Here I have to admit I was a little surprised that the DVD actually worked. Sometimes files on the bittorrent network are not always what they seem. So, my efforts could have resulted in a new DVD coaster, although the directory structure seemed both complete and legitimate.

Vista's installation is a breeze compared to earlier versions of Windows. It asks remarkably few questions, leading me to suspect that Microsoft has finally learned that all users are not computer science majors. Once the splash screen appeared, Vista asked me if the language, keyboard and locale settings were all right, which they were, so I clicked NEXT. It chugged for a while, then asked for a product code. That worked, too. Vista now asked if I wanted to install a clean version of Vista or to install on top of an existing version of Windows.

Since I needed to wipe the drive anyway, I opted to delete the existing Windows 2000 Professional partition, thus clearing off all the previous user's data, and to install Vista in a new partition. I then found something else to do, since formatting a 20 GB drive and installing a DVD-based OS takes an hour or more.

Eventually, I was rewarded with Vista reporting it had installed itself successfully and was now asking me to remove the installation media and to reboot the PC. At no point did Vista ask for drivers, complain about unsupported hardware or otherwise bother me with minutiae. It was like installing Linux!

After the reboot, I got to choose an administrative password and set up the admin's account, complete with a user avatar, like Windows XP offers. After a few more minutes, Vista reported it had found a domain (I had reconnected the PC after I was assured the ISO was legit) and asked if it should join it. The desktop appeared, and I was now ready to connect to the internet, activate my Windows version and download (as usual) recent updates.

So at this point, I have a working Vista test platform. I still have to join the PC to the workgroup and domain, so that it can access the file server and print server, and to install an antivirus program. Hopefully, our corporate version of Symantec AV will work on Vista. Otherwise, I'll need to install another app.

My experience with Vista so far is positive. I had no installation headaches, even with a downloaded ISO. Stay tuned for further developments.