[point and laugh] MS releases Vista by mistake

[DeZmond]

http://www.jcxp.net/news.php?newsid=1249

Apparantly MS was stupid enough to release Vista publicly for download, which is an unusual move if it's not a mistake (which I give a 95% probability it is). So...

*does Nelson impression* Ha-ha!

(and yes, you need a license key, so it may not seem quite as stupid as expected, but nevertheless, all the resource haxxors will probably be tearing apart the version of Vista as we speak)

 

[Haven]

Well I've got a valid licence key as I signed up to the testing program when I was an MSDN Universal member ... but I dont think I'm going to use that key anytime soon.

 

[BiG D]

I seriously doubt it's a mistake. Leaked copies of software can really drive up the hype if done right...

 

[Haven]

only if people actually download it and dont find that its a bag of ****.

 

[DeZmond]

By releasing software in this way they are just asking for the worldwide h4x0r vultures to swoop in. If it's deliberate, then it's very cavalier of them. Also it doesn't seem to have sparked a frenzy so if it's deliberate they've not got as much publicity as they wanted.

 

[BiG D]

You forget that they benefit from people having copies of their software, legit or not.

But yes, very little publicity, considering...

 

[Pestcontrol]

Hmm, it may be too early for a hype, otoh if you do this two weeks before vista is released, it may impact sales.

I think it's just a mistake of something that should've been distributed to testers only being publically available by accident.

 

[Haven]

http://www.tech-recipes.com/microsoft_vista_tips1317.html

Have Vista Installed, but either don't have a legitimate key, or your key is already in use? Extend your 12 days by disabling the activation!

open msconfig:
start\run and type msconfig

in the window move to the services tab.
uncheck both of the following:
Software Licensing Service and SL UI Notification Service

This will keep the activation from running and the second stops windows from continually reminding you that this has happened.
Your product is unregistered, but will continue to run.

And the best bit is that its all perfectly legal to do the above.

 

[thatbloke]

ooooooo even better. I may give this a whirl then... have been downloading it all afternoon for elDiablo... but on a 2.71GB file i'm only getting a download rate of 91.2k from Mickeysoft's servers though

 

[Raikiri]

Problem is the all teh links by microsoft have been taken down now. i went searching fir about an hour yesterday for it.

 

[thatbloke]

I have the file, but I'm not sure about the legality of hosting it somewhere now... as the links have been taken down I would guess the file is not meant for public distribution. but as I have it already I'm not going to remove it now

 

[thatbloke]

OOOO well with a little help from DeZmond I have gotten Windows Vista working on a laptop with a 2.2GHz Pentium M processor, 256MB of RAM, 32MB ATI graphics processor.

Simply put: you need a computer with WAY better specs!

I think the lack of RAM in this thing is whats causing it to be so damned slow... and i'm not sure that even 512MB would be enough... as according to the task manager CPU usage is constantly at least 3% and pagefile usage is at 383MB!!!

It is VERY slow when opening any kind of window... but still: the User Account Control has managed to piss me off within 5 mins of trying to do stuff with it. Quite simply, what this does is, unless you have marked a program beforehand as being safe to run without any restrictions, when anything runs that it either doesn't recognise or that attempts to modify a file or setting somewhere in the system, Vista first asks you for confirmation.

As this is so slow, I can't really use it to do much, as opening any window, for instance the control panel can easily take between 30-60 seconds due to lack of memory, so I'm a bit stumped!

I think that when Vista comes out, however, you will see the minimum spec for the low-end systems get ramped up considerably as it is quite a power hog...

 

[MadGinga]

oh balls, damn microshaft, i can still remember the good ol' days when it was windows 3.1, now the install size of windows is bigger than your entire hard drive was

 

[KillCrazy]

Bare in mind it's not a final release and probably still has lots of bugs and incomplete stuff in it. That may be a factor as to why it's running so badly.

 

[thatbloke]

Bare in mind it's not a final release and probably still has lots of bugs and incomplete stuff in it. That may be a factor as to why it's running so badly.

Indeed, this is a valid point. It is also the Ultimate edition of Vista, meaning that it has absolutely EVERYTHING in it... However XP goes pretty slow on 256MB of RAM, so I think that at minimum you will probably need a good 512MB of RAM in a system to run Vista decently.

 

[KillCrazy]

I've no doubt you will need a pretty decent computer to run Vista, it's just possible that it will be more optimised to run better on lower end computers when it's released.
Still, they're wanting it to blow the user away so it probably will be a resource hog!

 

[BiG D]

oh balls, damn microshaft, i can still remember the good ol' days when it was windows 3.1, now the install size of windows is bigger than your entire hard drive was

aha! That's a trap! I don't have the numbers to do some calculation right now, but harddrive space was way more expensive back then. If you figure out average $$/meg of harddrive space, I believe the new versions of windows cost less spacewise than the old versions did.

[edit]Here's what I'm talking about.[/edit]

 

[MadGinga]

hmm, i didnt think of that way, makes sense i suppose, more space to play with, better things can be done, hence why games are now on dvds instead of cds (and even further back floppy disks), bring on that days when installs are a few terabytes in size, now that would be an acheivement.......

 

[thatbloke]

bring on that days when installs are a few terabytes in size, now that would be an acheivement.......

thinking about that, if the slashdot story I saw a while ago turns out to be true, then in 5 years we could be having PETAbyte drives in our computers, as apparently some dude in america invented a 1.2 Petabyte drive.

Don't know how big a Petabyte is?

1 Petabyte = 1000 Terabytes.

1 Terabyte = 1000 Gigabytes.

now THAT is huge. Imagine a PVR or something with that much storage space???

EDIT: OMG how freaky is that... I check my slashdot RSS feed about 10 mins after posting this and there's new a story on there about a new technology for storing data... about 12-13 Petabytes in ONE CUBIC CENTIMETRE!

 

[MadGinga]

holy moly!!! thats a lot of data, imagine how much junk you'd end up with!! although saying that i've prolly managed to aquire nearly 1Terabyte of data in the last 2-3years, good god my ISP's must love me