Is it better than XP?

Does it use more resources than XP?

Is it another online varification install limited to one computer?

I won't answer if it is better or not as it is in beta, therefore it's not even a release candidate.
It looks nice and follows on from the XP theme rather than radically changing it. It's pretty stable for a beta but is VERY memory hungry.

In a virtual machine it needs about half a gig of ram to run like anything other than a pile of poo. Stick it on real hardware with 2GB DDR and it seems pretty happy and boots up nicely.

256MB of RAM is a minimum requirement but I would say that anyone using it on a machine with specs like that better have a lot of patience.

Well hopefully they do a lot of optimizing between now and release because there will be a lot of unhappy gamers should this hog system resources.

Lewis,
Is this the server or workstantion? Any significant improvement over XP ?

This is the workstation version, I have just finished installing the x64bit version as well, that runs a lot better.

Duke, I would imagine that thi will really be aimed at dual-core CPU's like the X2, we have just ordered a couple so when they arrive I would imagine that this would perform very well.

on a sidenote temi, did you sort out that stuff we were talking about via pm?

With regard to improvements over XP, remember it is still a beta!
The menus are brilliant, much better order of things, a bit more like the mac/unix filesystem (slightly) as well as file preview in the right-hand pane. I'll post some more screenshots when I get a sec. If there is anything in particular people would like to see then I will try my best to screenshot them.
When the WinFS filesystem is implemented I would imagine that the search functionality would be greatly improved although it is still a really nice feature built into the start menu. Basically, you start typing a program name and it auto-completes and you press enter to open that application/file.

forgot something else as well.....

IE7 is really nice, very secure with regard to script execution, tabulated browsing is something that should have ben included a long time ago but there are plugins for IE6 that allow tabs.
I have had the IE7 beta for sometime on XP and it seems like the version in longhorn has been locked down quite considerably. It isn't obvious though in a sense, you don't need to do any config with it.

A simple colour coding system has been implemented which warns of un-secure sites or invalid SSL certificates. a Nice loading bar has also been aded.

Duke, there was no online verification (or none that has yet instantiated anyway). A simple product key and the iso was all that was required. Install time of both the 32bit and 64 bit is LONG though, DVD's are 2.24 GB and it took around 4 hours to complete each installation.

Outside of the virtual machine it was much quicker (although it did have the full 2GB DDR associated to it).

I think thats all the questions answered?!?

IMHO they're just jumping on the tabbed bandwagon with IE7 because of Firefox and a little to late at that. I'll not be using Vista, I'll just keep my pirated XP Pro copy as it won't require half a gig of ram to run it.

It would be cool if Vista had a hibernation feature though when using other software.