Windows Vista Beta 2 on VMWare, working, and pretty nice

Ever since I learnt to use VMWare, I conduct all my risky system testing on VMWare. Anything that couldn't suddenly be installed and execute on VMWare will be eliminated from my test list. And that's why I skipped the last Vista Beta 1 since it was so VMWare unfriendly.

Recently Microsoft released a public beta of Windows Vista Beta 2, so I downloaded the 4Gb DVD iso, burned it on a DVD+RW disc, and installed it on a VMWare system. To my surprise, it ran pretty well. The following is my observation:

- A simply no fancy installation sucked up 9Gb of my harddisk space. Yes, I know Microsoft Windows is a fat a**. Still :-I

- Vista was almost unusable before installing VMWare Tool. And even after that it the network and sound was still not working right. Fortunately there's a way to fix the network problem. Simply open "Device Manager" (you can use the quick text lanucher provided by Start, pretty cool), right click on the Xed network adapter, choose specify driver location, and then point to d:\program files\VMWare\VMWare Tools\Drivers\vmxnet\win2k . And then, wala, I can use Vista to connection to the web.
I still haven't get the sound problem resovled. Maybe later.

-Cut and paste between Vista in VMWare and host computer desktop DOES NOT work. Maybe someone knows how to twist it.

- By default Internet Explorer has problem working with the proxy at my workplace. I have to turn off some security setting to make it work. On the otherhand, Firefox works great.

- I confirmed that IE 7.0 works with the web application I developed and currently maintaining for my client. Pretty nice.

- Autofit Guest Windows of VMWare also doesn't work. I have to explictly change screen size of Vista. Not the end of the world though.

- The perform of Vista in VMWare is actually pretty acceptable. At least it's much better than the crappy one I tested last time (even forget what build it was).

- Network Printer works. It's so cool to see I printed something from Vista.

I'll explore more later.