Orcas VPC Download info
Greg pointed me to the Visual Studio Orcas CTP Virtual PC image download. Downloading now.
First of all, I'm really happy to see a VPC image download. We've been asking for this for a little while, and it's great to see it happen.
Make sure you follow the download instructions carefully. There are two downloads - a base image and a difference disk image. That's smart for bandwidth, since future releases will only require download of the new difference disk, but it might throw you off if you only download the difference disk.
I see from Greg's screenshot he's just using IE to download them:
When I'm downloading a GB or more, I like to go with a download manager like the Download Them All Firefox extension. Back when I was using IE, I used Download Express. There are a lot of good reasons for using a download manager for big downloads:
- They download in multiple concurrent chunks, which is usually noticibly faster on large downloads.
- They let you pause the downloads. That was handy when I wanted to watch the OnTen Zune video.
- If something goes wrong part way through - which always seems to happen on huge downloads - download managers let you resume the download.
- They have really cool download progress graphs.
- They don't display negative progress - see Greg's -318% completion status above. ;-)
However you decide to get them, go get them!