Microsoft releases public download of (Beta) Vista

After months of limited testing, Microsoft late Wednesday made a beta version of Windows Vista publicly available for download.

The company kicked off what it called its "Customer Preview Program," a testing period in which the software maker hopes millions of tech enthusiasts will kick the tires on the new operating system.

Read the whole article here…

After messing with WMP and IE7 this past week, I can honestly say I’m excited about Vista. For the first time in a long time the thing doesn’t look like a boring Microsoft Windows, but like an OS who’s visual style was actually designed by people who specialize in visual style. However, none of this matters if the OS itself is buggy and crashes and really just doesn’t do its job well. Sort of like the rice burner that looks great but can’t go.

Anyway, I’ll probably check this out this weekend and see what all the fuss is all about. On the flip side, now that there is a public beta, it will be interesting to see if anyone can get it to run on the new Macs. I’ve seen some stuff about the previous MSDN betas running on Macs with the new Aero interface enabled, but many of those have been buggy. With this being the public beta, I expect it to be more stable and thus a more interesting feat if it runs, and runs well, on Apple hardware.

-Steve