You may not know this, but work kindly paid for a MSDN subscription for me - this effectively gives me access to all the Windows Vista betas.

I had played around with previous betas of Vista, but never actually installed it properly (it always ran inside a VMWare / VPC session).

I decided to give it a shot, and rather than risking my entire PC - got a USB HDD (a tiny little 320GB unit) to run Vista from, so I could switch back to XP any time I needed to by simply pulling the cable.

Apparently, Vista won’t boot if it’s system drive is a removable device.

Now, that was a whole lot of wasted effort.

Hrm… get an internal SATA HDD? No… I shouldn’t…