Vista betas will kill your data

MICROSOFT HAS let it be known that the behaviour of Windows Vista beta copies is about to change fairly substantially.

From May 31, anybody using a beta copy of the OS will find that their machine reboots every two hours, and that intermediate access will be limited to base-level file retrieval. That means that you could lose data you're working on, and that your machine will be good only for reformatting.

This isn't as bad news as it seems. Users who had taken part in the Vista beta scheme - millions of people, in fact - were all given free copies of Vista Ultimate by the Vole as a 'thank you'.

We suspect that this is more likely to affect those individuals who were using copies of the Vista beta nicked from mates or from BitTorrent in a bid to avoid having to pay for the full thing. The quick phase out means that this is possibly the shortest post-release beta Windows has seen.

So, if you're running on a Vista beta, you'd better scramble and get your system running, or else face a hard time come June. µ