I downloaded a copy of Windows Vista Beta 1 last night (legitimately I might add) and installed it on my 3Ghz workhorse system first thing this morning.
Installation itself was a breeze - I'd already prepared for the installation my shrinking my primary XP partition by 25Gb. The installation procedure pretty much boiled down to:
- Boot system from DVD
- Select empty space for installation
- Name the system
- Provide activation key
- Wait
Unfortunately, it looks as though I'm going to have to wait before I can see what the Aero Glass experience is like, as the 6600 GTOC I currently have installed doesn't have any LDDM (Longhorn Display Driver Model) support yet. Hopefully it won't be too long before nVidia provide a beta driver to play with.
Update: nVidia released some alpha LDDM drivers almost immediately, but on my system I ended up with a physical screen resolution of around 640 x 480 with a much larger 'virtual desktop' which does not pan or scroll. I'm going to wait until nVidia come up with newer drivers before I play around with Vista again.