Note: The preview program has now ended, so following these steps will not help you. Sorry.

But I did not download it from Microsoft directly. Their file servers were overloaded, so the wait time and download time were both horrendous. MS itself encouraged beta testers to request a copy of the Vista installation DVD by mail. Being impatient about such matters, I instead obtained a copy indirectly by looking for a torrent of Vista Beta 2. I figured someone must have put Vista Beta 2 on the bittorrent network soon after its public release.

My hunch was correct. My download time was still pretty long (1.5 days) but at least I got the complete DVD image in a reasonable amount of time. It was faster than snailmail, anyway.

--more -- Here's how it worked.

1. To get and use Windows Vista Beta 2, you had to go to Microsoft's Customer Preview Program site to obtain a product code, which was e-mailed to you. [NOTE: Microsoft has closed this program to new users.] I got the product code, but I did not follow through to the next step, which was to download the Vista ISO from Microsoft.
2. Instead, I visited seedler.org to see if a torrent of the Beta 2 version was available. There was, so I downloaded the torrent file and had Azureus, a free Java-based bittorrent client, chew on it for a couple of days. By the way, you can still get Vista Beta 2 from the bittorrent network, but without a product code you cannot install it. I offer no advice here on how to get a installation code.
3. Once I had the ISO, I burned it to a DVD. Not a CD. Windows Vista is a BIG operating system (OS), and requires a suitably robust machine to run it.
4. Now the question was, where do I put this monster of an OS? My desktop and notebook computers are both too slow (< 1.0 GHz). MS recommends a processor faster than 800 MHz and 512 MB of RAM, but I have used Windows XP on a 866 MHz machine with 128 MB RAM. It's not a pretty sight. So I thought I would instead load Vista on one of the PCs at my school.
5. Trouble here, too. It took a bit of sleuthing and reconfiguration to come up with a test platform. It is a whitebox with an AMD Duron 1.3 GHz CPU, 512 MB of RAM and a 20 GB hard drive. I opted to use the onboard audio and video to see how Vista liked them. The machine sits in the computer lab and is part of the school network, so I will be able to test how Vista interacts with Windows 2000 Server network.