Grabbing the bull by the (long)horns
I originally posted these on ByteKill, but figured that I would share it with the membership here also. Please bear in mind that this is kind of like an ongoing diary, hence the multiple quotes.
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First off, that was THE fastest install I have ever seen, bar none. Around 18 minutes total, even though they say it only takes 10. I'll put that off to the "PE" OS (i think thats what they call it) being installed first and then Longhorn installing. The only question it asked was for a name so it could create a user account.
HOWEVER....I installed Longhorn to my D: drive specifically. Like anything to ever leave Redmond, Longhorn had plans of its own. It still managed to get itself onto the C: drive by switching the drive letters. Typical.
So far I have not been able to get the old DSL modem up and running. That comes as no surprise, as I almost had to call in an exorcist to get it running under XP. I still have faith that it will inexplicably install itself within the next few startups just like it did with XP. The setup CD is in the spare burner just in case. Microsoft OS's do things in their own time, oblivious to any desires on the part of the end consumer.
So ends part one of what will most likely be a hair-raising experience. I will follow up in the near future and let you know exactly how painful or painless this adventure is becoming. Wish me luck!!
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Post subject: Thing that makes me go hummmmmm...
OK....I told you above that Longhorn had changed my drive letters, and as far as Longhorn is concerned, it did. When in XP however, my drives appear unaffected other than the Longhorn files that are installed on my D: drive. Could it be that Longhorn suffers from Bill's delusions of granduer?
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Post subject: OMG...it's ONLINE!!!!!! Reply with quote
Yup...and it was hell getting here. As expected, install of the DSL modem finally succeeded when I remembered that when installing under XP an extra folder showed up and had to be deleted for the modem to install. The folder that had to be deleted was the one that the manufacturer assured me was for win 2k and would work for XP also. Turns out that only the Win98 drivers work....but they work for 98, ME, 2k, XP AND Longhorn...go figure.
So now it's online and I'm beginning to install programs. So far I've got Mozilla (what else did you expect to be first?) and Trillian installed...both run fine. I'll re-interate that you don't want to try this with anything less that 800 mhz of processor. Thats whats on this machine and I have noticed a slight bit "drag" when I'm scrolling.
Thats about it for now....I'll keep you guys posted on how it does over the long term.
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OMG!!!!!!!!!!
An installation of Agnitum Outpost causes spontaneous reboots!!! This is not good....if TPF and ZA won't work it may be format city for the longhorned bull.
Where am I now? I got Outpost to install, but like the modem (which I failed to mention) I had to log in in safe mode as the admin to get it to take. And when running Longhorn it still sees itself as being on the C: drive instead of the D: drive that it actually resides on. I hold out hope that all of this is all due to the fact that this IS a beta copy and these things will be worked out in future versions. This version does not offer the new WinFS file system so I'm using NTFS (FAT32 not an option) which is a bit disappointing as I was anxious to see how WinFS was going to perform.
All in all I have to call this puppy a definite resource hog (no big surprise there). Even though it is basically WinXP with a different GUI, XP runs expotentially faster on this system than Longhorn does. For reference, this box has an AMD 800 mhz on an ABIT KT7a RAID board with 256 megs of RAM along with a 32 meg AGP card which in my opinion is THE BARE MINIMUM system requirement for Longhorn. It's pretty to look at and very stable but considerably slower than XP. I intend to continue to monkey around with it and from time to time I will post updates provided I come across any events or features worthy of note.
