I got the disk, but haven't installed it yet.... has anyone tried it yet?

I wasn't able to get it installed on my home machine. One thing that disappointed me was not having the SATA drivers on the install disk yet, but being able to load drivers from the USB flash drives rocks. At least it let me get further on the install than I was able to get without them.

I did install it on one of my laptops. It is usable for most things, just takes a while to get use to. It seems slower than XP on that laptop. I kept it around for maybe two weeks before wiping the machine and installing Linux back on it... If the next build is faster I might go back and try to do some development on it.

I do have Office 2007 installed on one laptop and my home machine. It was kind of culture shock getting used to it, but once I sat down and put some effort into it, the interface makes sense. I now use it for everything that I don't do on my desktop machine at work.

I installed Vista on my laptop and was very pleased with it. Until I realized that the one piece of software I needed didn't work. (3dsMax... damn you cdilla/flexlm whatever it is now.)

...and I did install a lot of WinXP drivers for things. I also had to "hack" the nvidia driver to recognize my video card as vista capable for aero effects.

I've been running it on a test laptop for about a month. I too loaded nvidia xp drivers which seem to work OK. I also loaded the Dell xp drivers for most everything else without a hitch. It is SLOW, way slower than XP. Beyond that, for the simple task of internet surfing, it has worked fine.

I believe the display drivers are something that do need to be the new WDDM format, but other devices will work with XP/2000 drivers.

My impressions of Beta 2 weren't so great. The new security model is implemented in a way that every experienced user will turn it off negating any advantage it has, and casual users will waste much time with it, to the point of clicking yes to everything and still having malware problems. Things are clearly being done with no thought process. I was investigating how to add an entry to the Games Explorer, and found it to be horribly complex. It starts off as having to create a series of files with a tool in the DirectX SDK, ok so far. Next, those files get compiled into a dll, odd, but ok. Next you have to code the game to make calls to that newly created dll to have it register the game, and ensure the dll is distributed with the game. Annoying to say the least instead of just making a call to something to put an entry there.

My experience with previous betas and this one have reminded me that I will switch to Vista only when forced. Sadly with the whole Direct X 10 hype, the switch may be soon after release. I guess I should start learning now how to strip it down enough to turn it into a Wintendo OS for the MacBook.

this might be a dumb question, but can I partition the hard drive without wiping out everything that is on it? I would like to put Vista on my extra hard drive, but there is a lot of stuff on it already.

Partition Magic should be able to do it. You should take a backup anyway and by that point, you might as well just wipe it clean...

I've used BootIT NG everytime I need to repartition a drive to install a new OS on it without losing information and never had a problem.