I finally got permision to use my companies MSDN subscription and set up a test box at the office to play with Vista. But I've been told to install it on a VPC to test on, before I get to format a computer.

Anywho, I'm not very impressed with the installer. It's clean and all, but it seems very slow. In the first portion of the setup, with the large progress bar at the bottom, I could set my mouse on the bar, and not moving the pointer, use it as a refrence point to make sure it was still running.

But after the reboot, it comes up to a screen that simply says:
. My pointer is now an hour glass, and the progress bar at the bottom is no longer a complete bar (i'm assuming) but a smaller bar that is very quickly moving.

However, the bar has been going from 0 to 100% at about the same rate, for the better part of two hours, with no visable changes to any other element of the screen. No new text, no new pointer, nothing.

Should I call this frozen? wait it out? I'm lost here, so far I'm about 3 hours (from boot to now) into install, is this normal?

System:
Host - WinXP Pro SP2, 1.5gig ddr, 1.5gig AMD
VPC - build 582, 512 ram, high CPU priority

I'd say its frozen I Just installed in on an old Dell Latitude 1 Ghz Processor and 256 megs of ram it is slow but installed in about an hour and a half

it's took me 3 hours for that part and i have a 2.4ghz and 512mb

3 different systems (of which I timed the installs), and none of them took longer than 35 minutes, total. Not nearly as fast as my WinXP installs, but certainly not an hour and a half, or three hours.

im @ 3 hours also :/ wtf is wrong

:/ It was still going for over 4 hours so i went to bed and woke up to it @ a bad looking Vista desktop. I installed on Virtual Pc 2k4 and its not worth installing from this virtual program.. Its slow as butter with the additions installed Wouldve done better installing on a real partition.. this was a waste of hours lol.

that portion of the install took about 45 minutes for me. i have a 3 ghz p4 with 512 mb of memory. i dont know if the slow time was part of the whole install or if it had to do with me installing on a secondary partition. either way i was very close to rebooting in the middle of it, yet decided against it. my patience paid off i guess. i wonder what exactly the installer is doing during that part of the install.

If you did on a virtual program.. youve been grown old lol. Took aleast 4-5 hours for mine and i belive the virtual program transfers data @ like 3KB sec..

i tried it again, and instead of 3 hours, it took 45 minutes, on an p3 800mhz with 640 mb. it's weird that the p4 took so much longer.

I have a 3200 AMD 64 and mine froze on a emulation and on a DVD+RW.......I reboot try again it happens again...Reboot works and then freezes on the customizing settings....

I am installing Windows Vista Beta 1 on a Dell Inspiron Laptop with 1GB RAM and a 3.2GHz P4 CPU. I am installing the OS from the DVD drive. It's taken me about 1 hour to finish the first part of the installationg after which it reboots and goes on to the screen that everyone is talking about:

Completing Installation...
Do not restart your computer at this time

The progress bar moves quickly towards the end and then keeps looping. After waiting for about 20 minutes I restarted and then went ahead and reformatted to start from scratch. I wish I had read this thread earlier and saved myself an hour 20 minutes by keeping my patience.

Has anyone figured out what is going on at this point? Is this a flaw in the progress bar or its representation?

It took about 1 1/2 hours to install Vista Beta 1 on my P4/Celeron 2.6 w/512 MB PC2700 and a 30GB HDD. It installed itself on F: for some reason. Found all hardware except the sound card. I have an old version of AVG, "ver 6_FREE", it worked on a few alpha versions of LH, gonna try it on this beta.