If you are looking into trying out Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) Beta, I would suggest not to do it. I spent a lot of time yesterday rebuilding my main desktop because Vista with SP1 won’t activate!
The main issue that I had was with licensing. The first time I logged in, it looked like everything worked fine, but after a few restarts things became bad. After the second or third login, Vista won’t let me login without activating, even though both the machines were activated prior to the SP1 install. When you go to activate it, it would fail activation. With the phone activation, it wouldn’t show me any digits in the groups so the phone support people could not help me.
Microsoft’s technical support couldn’t help me either since this was a Beta service pack. After about two calls I was told to call their MSDN support folks, who are not available over the weekends. I ended up rebuilding the system since I knew this would be quicker than going the MSDN route.
It seems to me that their SP1 install badly screws up their licensing because before rebuilding I tried several of the solutions posted online, none of which worked. I was willing to help with the SP1 Beta testing but knowing that it leaves the system unusable, kind of kills the purpose of having an operating system 🙂 So, unless you are lucky and are thinking that everything will work out for you, I would suggest waiting for Beta 2, if there is going to be one, or the final release. I am not angry or anything because I knew what I was getting into by trying out a Beta product.