Windows Codenamed 'Longhorn' Beta 1 - Tomorrow

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Winbeta are reporting that Windows Longhorn Beta 1 will be released to testers tomorrow. It's unclear what build will be shipped but Winbeta are saying 5112. Already beta related sites have started to go live.

Speculation is rife that Microsoft has pulled out all the stops to make this beta compatible with as much hardware as possible and has included a plethora of drivers. One suggestion was that 50%+ of the new build will be purely drivers.

Given that minimal drivers exist in the 831MB build of 5048 from WinHec we would estimate the beta build has the possibility of being larger than 2GB in size. Certainly this is a huge increase in size compared to the previous publicly tested build, 5048 from Microsoft's WinHec conference in April.

Last Friday Microsoft announced that Windows codename 'Longhorn' will officially be called Windows Vista. This announcement has been made too late to allow the artwork in Beta 1 to be updated so we expect it will retain it's 'Longhorn" moniker for now.

As in previous betas, artwork is considered a low priority update and as such we may see the Longhorn name on builds for quite some months yet. The only acknowledgement of Windows Vista evident in the build is rumoured to be by way of the desktop build number. It will likely say that it is Windows Vista Beta 1, yet all other areas of the Operating System will refer to 'Longhorn'.

Source: Winbeta