Tonight I installed Windows Vista Beta 1 on a virtual PC on my laptop. It required very little intervention, was a little long but otherwise un-eventful. After booting VPC took 100% CPU for quite some time and was a little sluggish, but after this has settled down to a CPU percentage in the high single-digits to low teens. Its quite usable for browsing and “normal” stuff (although I did notice a few redraw glitches). Its running on an external USB 2 7200 RPM HDD with 1.4 GB of RAM allocated to the VPC image (it feels good just writing that RAM amount). Overall the install and VPC experience was quite slick and painless, but I was a little under-whelmed by the actual OS. Hopefully as I dig around a little more I'll find some nice improvements.
