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Beta Day - First Thoughts
Well, it's been 12 hours since Microsoft released the largest slew of beta bits it has ever churned out, and the dust is still settlling. But I've been running 5381 as my sole OS since it was released last week, and I definitely have some observations. The news of two weekends ago was that Microsoft was paying bonuses for finding bugs in Windows over the Mother's Day weekend. At that time, I observed it was a hail-mary effort to make Beta 2 as pain free to consumers as possible. Yeah, that's my "I snort the Kool-aid every morning at breakfast" way of saying that 5381 was a dog, and MS needed to fix it or get beaten up like an ex-CTU agent. While I can't confirm anything, 5384.4 was built on the 18th of May (last Thursday) at 2:55pm... 4 days after that weekend bug bash. From what I have seen so far, this build delivers that. It's not without problems, but compared to what it could have been... it's much better that I expected.Performance
Performance in 5384 has been fantastic. One of my bigger beefs with 5381 was the way the desktop presented itself on bootup. The desktop would already be visible for several seconds before the "Windows Start" sound would appear. Now, the "Preparing your Desktop" screen stays visible until my desktop is almost completely loaded... which is a much better experience. Performance is improved everywhere. IE7 ditched that REALLY FREAKIN ANNOYING flicker that made me want to punch my screen...which was really nice for my anger management classes. Creates far less homework for me. (more)