Author: Blue Horizon
With this build we enter the Beta 2 stage of development. There's even more webiness and more visual tweaks, so let's dive in.
The OS Loader is slightly changed as it now displays "Starting Windows NT" when booting up. Although a much more polished OS loader has yet to be introduced.
A bootscreen has finally been introduced in Windows NT. This bootscreen seems similar in style to the old Mac OS bootscreens.
Upon starting the GUI setup, there's now a new banner that identifies as "Beta 2".
During networking setup it now gives options for typical or custom settings, which stayed in the final build and XP as well.
Well, right off the bat, blue desktop color. And it also seems that some quick launch icons are gone.
And it seems the arrow next to the show desktop button is gone. Guess they thought that people wouldn't use those shortcuts anyway.
Oh, I almost forgot - This build features a new welcome window which allows novices to configure IE, see what's "new", and of course "register" with M$.
The MS-DOS command prompt is now replaced with the newer one in the start menu. Although previous builds did have it, you had to type "cmd" in Run to open it.
Might as well get the first webby thing out of the way. IE 4 has been upgraded to IE 5 which seems to have a slightly better rendering engine, though not all HTML 1.0 websites render correctly.
And in case you're wondering, the IE credits easter egg doesn't work anymore.
And followed up by IE 5 is the obligitory screenshot of Outlook Express 5 (Beta 1). Not much new to see here.
Bla bla bla desktop as a webpage bla bla bla... I'm clearly running out of ways to talk about how dumb this feature is.
Add/Remove Programs is now webby and also crashes too when you hover over a simple button.
Hardware Wizard has a new icon on the left side and top of the wizard.
This build now includes Media Player 5.2, although it says that in the start menu, when you open it it's actually identified as version 6. Also the media player has a static image for some reason.
Interestingly enough there is a 16-bit version of WMP 5.2 for Windows 3.1x, compared to WMP 12 which only runs on Windows 7 or later.
Along with Media Player 5.2/6 comes Microsoft Comic Chat, which is like a toyish version of IRC. And at this point there we're many other IRC programs that could do better.
The search is no longer an independent program, as it is now a component of IE! Why must the idea of web browsers replacing operating systems gain so much traction?
"My Documents" now has a pictures folder as well as a preview area on the left. Although it will be quite a while after Windows 98's release before NT 5.0 comes to market.
I didn't feel like showing a screenshot of it in the last build or this build, but FDC.SYS still crashes the OS - And in this build the BSOD is now black instead of blue. Now that is emberrasing, even for a beta. Not that the BSOD is black, but that a driver for something that's over two decades old doesn't work properly.