Author: Blue Horizon
We are now at what is considered the last build worth looking at. Of course my mission is to look at every build I can get my hands on.
Although this is considered to be nearly identical to XP, some things are still missing, like the final Windows XP wallpaper.
The bootscreen is nearly identical to the final at this point. This introduces the loading bar with 3 blue or green squares depending on the edition of XP you have.
The OOBE loading screen now identifies itself as XP. And for some reason it says "Version 2002" even though XP originally launched in 2001.
Q-Mark now has his final sound effects and animations. But the text he says is still in Comic Sans. Are they trying to ressurect their commercial flops at this point?
This is what you first see when you start this build. As you can see, they've pretty much finalized the look and feel of Windows XP. There's even a balloon tip telling you to take a tour of XP.
MSN Explorer has a visual upgrage. Moving on.
This build now includes 5 new sample pictures. One of which is in the final version. These 4 unused pictures might actually fit quite nicely into Vista.
I don't know why, but this XP screensaver in this build looks much higher quality to me than the final. They got the hue of the flag right.
This build now has two new variants of the Luna theme. "Homestead" and "Metallic". They're actually just "Olive green" and "Silver" with different names.
These actually seem like more creative names than just naming it colors. They did a similar thing before in Windows 3.x with one of the themes being named "Hotdog Stand".
Anyway, here's screenshots of both themes along with custom selected wallpapers. And that's pretty much the only colors you're going to get from these three choices. Like red? Forget about it.
The famous XP sounds are introduced. One interesting thing to note here is that these sounds from this build have a higher bit rate than the final, so I will provide a download for them here:
Finally, here's the brand new Windows Tour. You can either choose to watch the tour in Flash, or play the webby tour made of HTM documents.
And of course here's a download for the tour if you're interested: