Many tech enthusiasts have ventured into the waters of trying a computer program that is a "Beta" product- A product still under construction from both a coding and quality assurance point of view. When anyone does this; they are taking a risk (albeit a calculated one if you're experienced and have confidence in a company's ability to put out beta builds that are stable).
The thing is, it's still a risk. One way to mitigate that risk is to either have a test partition on your hard drive that you can choose to boot to; or run a virtual machine which provides a "sandbox" that more or less faithfully reproduces an operating system. (I highly recommend ALWAYS going this route; even if it's something you trust)
Why?
Because if you don't, other software may become unstable (your whole OS for instance) if a new dll file is installed overwriting one that other programs depend on to be stable. New programs sometimes upgrade known dll's (or other file types) without your knowledge; and whats worse, just because you uninstall the "beta" program; many 9if not most) times files from the beta are not either removed or placed back to it's prior state.
This can be any kind of file and can happen on a Mac OSX, Linux, Windows, or any other type of O.S.
Vista has made some strides in this area by segregating installed files from each other so that installing something (in theory) shouldn't crash other apps or your OS altogether.
So my question is regarding the new beta of Google Chrome, and/or Microsoft's IE8 Beta II. of those who've tried it out. Are you protecting yourself by installing it in a "non-live" environment? If you're installing it on a live environment; make a case for why you think it's no big deal.
The only reason I can think of to do my last proposal is because you have shadow copies, or frequently ghosted images of your system.
Also, whether you've installed the beta of Google Chrome or IE8 beta II; have you noticed any degraded performance on your O.S. or other apps? (test or not).
And finally; if you do use a test system for betas, what do you use? Microsoft's Virtual PC? VMWare? Zen? other hard drive or partition.
This should be an interesting discussion.
4 comments:
Here's the thing.... Everything I care about is backed up. I just don't have anything on the computer that I'm afraid of losing. So I install any and all betas I want, without fear. Besides, most companies have a vested interest in not crashing your OS. So I rarely worry about...
I only use virtual machines when running test security applications.
With you being an I.T. person; I would expect nothing less. You're way poses no threat. 'IF' you ran into a problem; you would only have to get your PC that's no doubt imaged to some degree (if not completely)
I too have used Beta apps from Google -GMAIL- which for a HUGE percentage of it's existence was labled BETA.
Perhaps we should list the companies we each trust. Conversely, if we've ever had a bad beta experience we should list that.
I've never had a problem with any Google App. Since 2002 (with the exception of early versions of Vista - Pre Release candidate) I've had ZERO problems with Microsoft's beta products.
I've had some trouble with independent game companys; especially sports products on the computer platform. Forget about beta products; generally speaking released games often have weird problems or are buggy. (and on a computer platform that's somewhat excusible due to the fact there is NO-WAY any game on a Microsoft platform can be teseted for every computer setups - some can be pretty exotic)
Even EASports can fall into that category. That's one of the advantages of playing on a console vs a PC.
The worst experience I ever ran into was Sierra's Football Pro '99. I was a FAITHFUL user of the 5 time game of the year winning product through the 90's.
Each year after 1996 it would take two or three major patches over a few months before the games ran appropriately.
The 1999 vesion was recalled after being on shelves for 2 weeks. Sierra vowed to patch it and re-release it in 2000; but scrapped the whole football and baseball line.
THAT SUCKED!
Fred, I've never had any major problems with a beta. I've installed the Betas for Windows 98, Windows XP and Vista, and the only problem I had was with audio drivers with XP (when playing certain games.) As far as betas for games, they are very safe also. I think Direct X has a lot to do with that. Even though you may have billions of hardware combinations, the way the API handles it stays the same via the OS and Direct X.
I've done the betas for 5 MMORPGs in the past few years, including World of Warcraft, Dungeons & Dragons:Stormreach and Lord of the Rings Online. Most of the problems are usually graphic glitches and connection issues. I think WoW was the only one that crashed on me, but it never crashed the OS.
I remember the problems with games in the late 90's. Most of that had to do with the way windows handled memory, and there was no standard for audio. Remember that it took years for them to decide to make everything SoundBlaster compatible. Then you had to set up you your EMM 386 to use your whopping 640K to its fullest. Wow, I really do not miss those days, but I was able to run games that were 486 only on my 386 because I mastered little things like that.
Well folks, I think this pretty much covers where we are with betas these days. Also remeber backups never hurt.
Malcolm, I had NO-IDEA you had participated in so many beta's!
Impressive!
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