Beta 2 was released yesterday and I’ve now had a chance to install it and have a quick play, so here are my initial thoughts and some screenshots.

The search is now fully working; in Beta 1, it would only search "user" folders. Now you can specify what to search in – you end up defining a virtual folder, so can pick and choose drivers and folders to include & exclude, as well as all manner of other query types. It’s very powerful and seriously quick.

A fair number of the games seem pretty polished (despite the <1.0 version numbers in the title bars) – Solitaire is still there as is Minesweeper. The chess game also looks pretty fantastic, with lots of nice animations.

Domain user switching is still there from Beta 1 – when Vista is in a domain, hitting Windows + L no longer locks the computer, but takes it to the logon screen where someone else can logon and then switch back to the first user. Very neat, and a godsend for IT support staff I would guess! I’ve not found the user save state feature yet that supposedly allows night time reboots for patching without punting a user off.

A quick look at the system properties shows it to be the "Ultimate" edition, just one of out 7 different flavours apparently.

Generally, it’s just a nip and a tuck across the board, but looking pretty neat. I still haven’t found a properly supported (LDDM) graphics card that’s powerful enough to display all the Aero effects yet though