A Flight Of Fancy On A Windswept Field

Okay.  Longhorn is installing. 
What I said before? Firing up Win2k3, creating a partition, cloning off the VM and overwriting it?
Worked perfectly!
So here we go:

Windows Longhorn Build 5048.

We have a pretty new start up screen.

Welcome to Windows Setup.

Agree to the Blah Blah Blah

Settings?  Okay!

Basically what happened above was me formatting my cloned machine’s hard drive so I can install this beast.

Next we name the machine.

Just in case we wanted to set up the time zone or something? Nope! Shot down!

Sit through a bunch of this crap for a few minutes…



So this time around it gives an active command prompt while it is installing Windows.  I decided to play around with it a bit…

Windows Media Player had to be killed with the Task Manager.  I was unable to get Windows Explorer to load, but hey…I could have played Solitaire while I waited if I wanted to!

That was basically the end of the installation.  Later I will play around with the OS and see what fun things there are to be had.
*Bonus*

Aero Theme!

Stretched To The Point Of No Turning Back

So I figured out why the Windows Longhorn build 5048 was giving me install errors!
It does not have the ability to create a partition on a blank hard disk!  Which simply means spinning up a different install ISO long enough to create a partition.  Exit Windows setup, switch out the ISO and restart.
Will it be that easy?
MAYBE!
Right now I am ripping my Windows .Net Server 2003 RC2 CD so I can use that.  I’ll probably set it up then clone off the virtual machine so I can install Longhorn.

Into The Distance A Ribbon Of Black

Started playing with the Windows Vista Longhorn Post Reset betas today.  Ran into some issues in the install, but here is what I have so far:

Bios date set to 2/5/2005, IDE controller for 25gb hard disk and CD-ROM.

As you can see it did not care for my storage configuration in VirtualBox.  Going to have to figure that one out.

Carry On My Wayward Son

Okay.  I'm going to start off by saying this thing is stupid long.

Like seriously stupidly long. 

This is one of the last public builds of the Pre-Reset Windows Longhorn.  It was still heavily influenced by and borrowed a lot from Windows XP.

I'm not going to lie...I had an awful lot of fun with this one.  Don't ask how or why, but I was really enjoying my time here.  

First off, the installation Process.

We have our standard Preinstallation loading screen.

New OS, new splash screen.  Awesome.

Wait...What? No blue text based installation?  What kind of nonsense is this?

Pretty straightforward so far.

Plug in a serial number...

Agree to a license agreement that you (probably) won't even read.

Yay for a summary with things you can sometimes change.

Disk Manager app that has become such a familiar sight.

Name your PC

Backtrack to an updated settings screen.

Now we wait.

And wait.

Keep with the waiting.

Setup is detecting stuff...Hooray!

I did this on a laptop.  Now we have the updated battery screen.

I really like the clock and calendar here. 

Wish it had stuck around.

Control Panel.

More of that.

Notification screen.  Yes. That is Office 2000 Professional

installing in the background.

Hooray...My battery doesn't suck!

The My Computer screen.  I haven't really decided

how to feel about things like the sidebar.

Yet more control panel.

Looking over the power options.