I started the install of Vista SP1 Beta at 9:40pm this evening on my ThinkPad T60p. It finished installing at 10:22pm.  My laptop HDD was quite warm by the end of the install; it had been cranking along for quite some time.

I also grabbed the September QFE testing packages: Windows6.0-KB941649, Windows6.0-KB941651, and Windows6.0-KB941229.

My thoughts?

• I can burn a recovery CD/DVD now... yay?
• All the IBM OEM utilities appear to continue to function.  I'm running Windows Ultimate x86 (July, 2007) from the Lenovo pre-install.  I had removed a bunch of the junk in the preload using the Base Software Administrator.
• Outlook 2007, Remote Desktop client, MSN Live Messenger, Skype all seem to work.  XviD video files are playing fine, VLC works fine.
• My laptop recovers from hibernation faster - there's less HDD cranking... this is PROBABLY a result of the correction of the ReadyBoost bug that caused the entire cache to be flushed after a resume from hibernation.
• Browsing a network share of pictures, and video files loaded faster.  Thumbnails are being cached/read more intelligently.
• Moving files on the local computer is much, much faster.  It used to sit and crank while it "counted" files and "thought" about the process.
• SSTP!  I'm going to set this up in the next few days, time permitting...

I finished downloading the RC0 bits for x86 and x64 a few minutes ago.  I'll have to burn the stuff to disk sometime tomorrow before I can play.

• Hypervisor in x64 bits - I'm going to put this on a Core 2 6300 machine with 3 GB of RAM sometime this coming weekend - and see how it goes. =)