Finally much anticipated Beta 2 release of Windows Vista has been annoounced and build has been made available for developers as well as home users. This means that Windows Vista is almost feature complete and users can see what to expect from the final version of the operating system. But you never know. There has been so much back and forth talk about new User Access Control feature in Vista that Microsoft may decide to make some significant changes to the behavior by the time final version is released. But I do not expect much changes from this point on. You can download Vista Beta2 by clickin on following link.

 Get Windows Vista Beta 2!

Hardware Requirements

There has been lot of talk about new cool user interface features in Windows Vista. I have been using Vista for almost 3 years now. And I love the what Microsoft has done with GUI. But it all comes at a cost. And that cost you will be paying in terms of beefy hardware. Here is Microsoft's stand on mimimum hardware requirement.

Developer Machine Configuration

Above mentioned hardware configuration will hold good if you are installing Windows Vista for home use or office work. But if you are planning to use Windows Vista for development machine then the hardware requirements are little heavy. Just enabling features like IIS will make the OS use memory in the the range of 600-700MB. And I am not joking baout it. And now you install Visual Studio 2005 and open a decent size solution with couple of projects in it and you will see memory consumtion close to 1GB. On development machine a machine with atleast 2GB is mimnimum requirement to get some decent performance.