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It is simple, one DVD-R. Buy a DVD writer ... dude. I have no clue what takes 3GB (maybe they've got a lot of debug symbols?), but it's really not that big of a deal to assume a DVD drive these days. In fact, it might be doing a few people a favor if there are still PC producers who believe they can ship you a CD-RW and no DVD in a year.

And operating systems used to come on one 3.5" disk.

What's the big deal?

>And operating systems used to come on one 3.5" disk.

or better...used to come on ROM...

And took 2s to boot.

Wanna bet the next version of Windows eats a whole HD DVD?

Time marches on dude!

OS X Tiger had to come on DVD, the first version to do so, and this is in 2005. OS X is not small, it's just not needlessly bloated and disorganised.

At least the SuSE distro comes with a complete office suite on that DVD..

I already have it downloaded and installed in VMWare. I'm going to install it native when I'm actually at home tonight.

I used wget to get the file, who needs download managers?

with wget error--> operation no permited
any advice?

Not sure, but it had no problems using wget to download the file. I set the retries to infinite but it never had to retry. I installed it on my P4 3.0Ghz 1.5GB ram machine at home. With a GeForce4 FX5200 video card (128MB) I scored a 2 on the perf meter. So far it runs ok but I get long pauses during some operations like changing the screen res or switching users. The UAC box also causes my monitor to go into suspend for about a second every time it pops up.

1) They are probably including all the debug symbols.

2) XP used to come in a CD but that doesn't means it "fits" in a CD. Back in 2001, there were not too many DVDs. For XP, Microsoft probably had to take out many things. Specially weird drivers, but there's also many "kits" that you had to download from Microsoft's web page.


Now that DVDs are really mainstream, Microsoft can afford to put a DVD of crap there. Extra drivers, for example. Who cares, really? - it's just one DVD

It isn't the fact that it is 3 gig that I have a problem with.

My problem is that it is now 3 gig and still doesn't come with cool software to play with.

They could bundle software for common tasks that is spyware free, for instance.

My problem is that it is now 3 gig and still doesn't come with cool software to play with.

And my point is that those 3 GB include many debugging symbols (debugging symbols take a LOT of space, and we linux users are smart enought to use apt-like systems instead of fscking .isos to deliver software) that you don't get with a linux distro and drivers that you don't get with a linux distro.

Edited 2006-06-08 02:43

They could bundle software for common tasks that is spyware free, for instance.

Antitrust concerns make this a non-starter, I believe.

Yeah, they where going to have Onecare for free but they had to remove it because of anti-trust issues. Kind of a shame, they messed up once and because of it there being bullied. I would say just punishment except it's really the users who are paying and not them.

In the short term perhaps yes.
In the long run however, I think it's the other way around, due to antitrust, there is valid competition in the market, which I would believe (atleast to some extend) will force better software for us.

Jody: "It isn't the fact that it is 3 gig that I have a problem with.
My problem is that it is now 3 gig and still doesn't come with cool software to play with.
They could bundle software for common tasks that is spyware free, for instance."

Roughly speaking - you are actually getting all the features of Media Center and all the Features of Tablet PC operating systems combined.

The Media Center features and tablet features are very slick and very cool all by themselves.

Roughly speaking - you are actually getting all the features of Media Center and all the Features of Tablet PC operating systems combined

This is pretty cool. I don't have anything that can qualify as tablet, but I have the Media Center, powered by MythTV.
I'm using Linux nearly exclusively since 2001.
I still have a Windows client with Windows XP SP2. I won't touch it, but I have a Mandriva on it that I can replace with Vista Beta 2.
The Mandriva serves me to help the users I migrated to it in case of problem, but they didn't have any for months.
I won't buy Vista, but as with Windows XP, I heard lots of things on how good it is, though far less than for WinXP.
Currently, no OS can provides me every feature I need, except for my custom Linux (which is the same that is installed on my web frontal, my main dual CPU box, and the media center).
I'll be able to see how Vista (Beta 2) fare against all the requirements I have. Compared to 2001, when I discovered WinXP was unable to even provide the basics of what I needed, the new MS OS will now have to compare against the features of my Media Center.
Being able to see how the FOSS I use fare against the latest MS developments is interesting (at least for me), so I have only positive things to say about this MS release.

The Media Center features and tablet features are very slick and very cool all by themselves

I'll be able to see by myself, but I don't hold much hope that Media Center have even 3/4 of the features I use on my MythTV box (especially the automatic program selection and integration of games and emulators). But I'll be watching for automatic reencoding in xvid, and automatic wakeup/shutdown, as well as hardware support.

And the thing is, once you're over 800MB and have no hope of getting on a CD you then have a new limitation on size. Since you're going to require a DVD anyway, you might as well fill it up.

Debug symbols, WTF?, there is no way that takes up so much space, what are you smoking?

What actually comes with Vista, a office suit?, seems to me it's code bloat and you can expect as XP does to grow to at least 4-5Gb.

But hey we all have 200Gb hard drives, dual layer dvd writers and 1Gb of ram right?

> Debug symbols, WTF?, there is no way that takes up
> so much space, what are you smoking?

$ g++ -o parse parse.cc -I /usr/include/boost-1_33_1/ -Os -g
$ ls -l parse
-rwxr-xr-x 1 libero Nessuno 5672196 Jun 8 17:40 parse
$ strip parse.exe
$ ls -l parse
-rwxr-xr-x 1 libero Nessuno 314368 Jun 8 17:41 parse

A 1800% increase in size sounds like "much space" more to me, indeed.

That's with cygwin, btw, so one can't say it's ELF's fault. Notice how it's compiled with -Os too.

Edited 2006-06-08 15:47

Even a single CD distro or liveCD can boast more value for money.

It's great for MS that they're getting all this free testing, i can't understand the appeal of Microsoft's beta level product myself.

Probably has a lot to do with the way the installs now, specifically the fact they're using what amounts to a sysprepped image file with a lot of extra drivers included as a way of speeding up the install process.

Not to mention that the DVD contains builds for both x86 and x64 with all the attendant binaries. Also the single DVD contains all the OS features you could possibly have in Windows (all the way from Home to Ultimate).

If that were the case for this build, why have seperate ISOs for x86 and x64?

tons of software included with the OS ?
what planet are you on man ?

are you saying sol, notepad, calc, wordpad, media player, are tons of software ?
do you think people actually use them ?

//are you saying sol, notepad, calc, wordpad, media player, are tons of software ?
do you think people actually use them ?//

er .. i use WMP, calc, and notepad just about every day. So do millions of other users. A$$hat.

The .NET framework is pretty hefty and once all the debug symbols are gone the size should drop considerably.

I wouldn't be surprised if 1G was devoted to drivers. The rest is probably .NET and other 'managed' runtime services.

Ayuh. My download already stalled...

hmm...should we all get on our knees and to thank MSFT for this FREE (this word makes me convulsively check what's wrong with antispam filter) OFFER?

FYI: even if you find and report and provide fixes to all the bugs remaining in this release and even if you give 'em killer-app(pure brilliant)-idea they will still charge you for final release.

or perhaps you're not staff after all, thought it claims you are on the reply page

If you're expecting high demand you can always put your main file servers on BT duty, that way everyone can use your hefty bandwidth until it's at capacity, at which point the client starts asking around.

"I pay money to have less problems, no more."

you pay that money to MS and expect less problems? surely that only guarantees more expensive problems.

you must remember than this is a wide open free beta, no one's paying money, they can waste the money you pay them on lots of bandwidth for all the fanboi 12year old kids who want to play with vista before anyone else, or they can limit bandwidth and access and hope that as demand for the beta grows previous downloaders will seed to bittorrent trackers, therefore increasing the availability of the beta, which can only be a good thing for them, and making it slightly illicit, well, you had to sign up for it before, which is exactly the kind of rebelious things those aforementioned kids are after.

//you must remember than this is a wide open free beta, no one's paying money, they can waste the money you pay them on lots of bandwidth for all the fanboi 12year old kids who want to play with vista before anyone else, or they can limit bandwidth and access and hope that as demand for the beta grows previous downloaders will seed to bittorrent trackers, therefore increasing the availability of the beta, which can only be a good thing for them, and making it slightly illicit, well, you had to sign up for it before, which is exactly the kind of rebelious things those aforementioned kids are after.//


Holy run-on sentence, Batman. Obviously, you've never paid for any writing classes.

Why this BT obsession? Well the download probably wouldn't have timed out 5 times through their current method. It isn't just whether they can afford the servers or not.

Not everyone. I am actually maxing out my ownload speed here... (775 KB/s)

"Microsoft does provide a direct link to the ISO for this purpose."

Maybe you should read his whole post.

Thank you sappyvcv; some people apparently have comprehension problems.

Right now the page is down due to high traffic, but once it comes back up I'll get started with the download using a download manager. Many thanks to the article poster for giving the direct link to the files!

Why is it a problem, is your WiFi connection slower than your internet connection or are you using WEP and concerned that 3GB will give enough useful data to break the key?

Another good reason to use BT is its block checksums. Does everyone really expect to get a clean download of 3-4 GB? With BT, it'll detect that bad block and re-download just that *one* block, not the whole file.

They could at least provide md5sum, that you can test if you have whole file with all chunks. On iso-hunt there is some file similary named and the dovnload is much faster.

P.S.: I think it is OK to say that because beta is free to download.

Yes, and it pisses me off . I have a day off today, perfect day to test Vista.

Which is exactly why they should not provide a live DVD for testing. Testing is only valid when the same circumstances of a normal installation yields a bug. A live DVD is not a normal installation.

True..

MSDN is more than downloading beta's.Most people don't have the time for it:)