Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Microsoft Beta Fest Begins

Microsoft has released Beta 2 for Windows Vista, Windows Longhorn Server, and Office 2007. WOW - all three at once. It's going to be a bugfest weekend of software installation!!

Well it might be - if I can get the software downloaded. The betas for Vista and Longhorn are being provisioned from Microsoft's new Connect site. Right now, I'm downloading Longhorn server and the download is saturating my 2mbs adsl pipe! It was no problem to et on and the download has been very steady. But there are big (6 GB for both).

Office 2007, however, has been harder to get. First, you must register (again on yet another site). This took me around an hour due to over loaded servers, lots of retries, etc. Once this is completed, you are required to download (yet another) download manager called SmartSource. When this runs it asks for the email address you registerd with and prompty fails in my case. So after 2 hours, I've got the keys, but no Office.

Why does the Office 2007 team has to reinvent the wheel and use yet another 3rd party tool that breaks the first time they use it? Especially when Connect works. So far as I can tell, Connect is standing up very well to the strain. Well done to the Windows beta team!

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