Sunday, July 23, 2006

Office 2007 Beta 2 Language Settings

OK, so it turns out that Office 2007 Beta 2 won't just not install on my Vista Beta 2 test box, it won't install on my XP Service Pack 2 machine either. Apparently, "The language of this installation package is not supported by your system." WTF!!!

Well, alright, by Redmond's standards I may have a "non-standard" installation in that my language settings are UK English not US English. But EN-UK and EN-US are really not that different from each other. Maybe the ISO file I downloaded from the Microsoft Beta Experience site is cooked. Actually, that's probably the case because the Beta 2 image I have from a PC Plus coverdisc seems to work better. But it still doesn't work right with Vista Beta 2. I think I'm gonna pull the plug on Vista for now. It's just too much effort for too little reward.

Maybe I'll do some testing of ReactOS or AROS on my dev/scratch machine, instead. I may even look into a *nix instead if I can be bothered. My current favourties run to Ubuntu and OpenSuse but I'm always open to new distros. The only major drawback with those is that they generally don't have particularly good development tools.

Oh well, guess I'd better start looking through my OS discs to see what I'm gonna be testing next.

Saturday, July 22, 2006

Vista Beta Testing

I'm currently testing a build of Windows Vista on my scratch/development machine. First impressions: not particularly impressed. I think I'll be sticking with Windows XP for the forseeable future.
The main problems are that it's horribly slow and seriously annoying with all the breaks in workflow that the default settings impose on me, even in an admin account. I think that I'll be switching off a lot of the "safety features" and other fluff which are turned on by default to see if that makes any kind of difference.

The other big problems: I can't install the Beta 2 edition of Office that I have on Vista because I have "non US" settings. Well pardon me for having a UK setup! Oddly enough, I also can't install Visual Studio 2005 for similar reasons. WTF!!! And this is supposed to be close to shippable code (Beta 2 build). God knows what kind of chance someone with non Roman-based languages, such as Korean or Japanese stands of getting anything out of Vista. How could something so fundamental as language options be broken? Isn't this code supposed to be based on the XP code-base?
Maybe I'll try re-installing it using non UK settings and see how things go with that.


More opinions later, once I've done some more testing...