I was wondering if anyone on campus did any Beta testing? What was it for? How did you get into it? Your experiences from doing it.


I just got my confirmation Saturday that I've been accepted as a Windows Vista Beta tester and a Media Center Extender Beta tester. I got on mostly because of my Xbox 360 and I was curious enough to apply.

I was wondering what others think about this stuff? I was told that if you discover 3 errors that you get a free copy of the final version when it comes out, guess I'll see.

with the trend of any other version of windows out there, that shouldn't be very hard.

i was a beta tester for xbox live back in the day.

All I did was fill out surveys to get it. What I got was pay the $50 dollars for the xbl kit 3-4 months early, got a free t-shirt, headset/game holder, special edition orange memory card, re-volt and xbl only version of nfl fever 2003. All and all it was pretty cool, but sad to see a lot of options on live fail, though most have returned with 360

This is retarded... MS just released the entire Vista Beta 2 to everyone publicly.

This could be coming from the fact that several people in my Beta group were having problems accessing the download to get it to the group and the WindowsConnect people were having problems figuring it out.

No, but I do a survey thing, at mysurvey.com. Get product samples all the time to try before they hit the market (last thing I got was two cans of Pringles, both the same flavor with small differences, and you chose what you liked best.

I've been in about a dozen beta tests for various PlayStation 2 and PSP games. Got into most of them through my job as an administrator for the PlayStation.com forums. Honestly, most of them were pretty lame. It seemed like they rarely used gamer-feedback, and were just looking to stress-test their online game servers. FFXI was nice though because I got a free 40GB HDD out of it.

I beta tested XP and 2003-but just about everyone could do that. After 3 years, they're not too bad.

I've done a bunch of palm os beta tests and a few individual windows programs, but nothing major and so far I really haven't gotten anything out of doing these. Half the time, the development dies before it's ever workable or I can't help the whole way due to one retarded reason or another.
-mm