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.
