TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

I stumbled upon a beta copy of Microsoft's new OS by way of a mutual acquaintance who had an MSDN account which entitled him to 10 free licenses for Vista. The catch? All the licenses expire September 30, 2005. The other catch? Well, I'll let you all be the judge of that.

Install:

Install came from a 2.5GB DVD image and lasted no less than an hour and fifteen minutes. The installer for Vista has improved by Microsoft's standards (considering the installer for Windows 2000 and XP were both text-based).

Vista's installer, even in beta, is a noted graphical improvement and even offers you the option of a cancel button to back out of the install process once it's started. I didn't test it, so I don't know how or even *if* it works.

You're given the "Recommended" option of upgrading an existing XP installation or installing a "Custom" clean install. Don't let the wording fool you; the clean install is just as automated and hands-off as the Upgrade.

One nice addition to the installer is that all the user-related questions are asked up front, allowing the person installing the OS to get all that out of the way and then go out for pizza while it installs. You'll want to have something to do to kill nearly an hour and a half, trust me.

For those of us with SATA drives, the disk partitioning screen gives you a button to click and insert a driver disk. I installed this on my junk drive (a 5-year-old 20GB Western Digital IDE) so that wasn't an issue.

Once you've entered in all your information (not to forget the all-important Product Key) the installer chugs along and gives you a rather cheeky message: "That's all the information we need from you. Windows will finish installing on its own." Well, *excuse me*. I'll just go polish my brass bust of Linus Torvalds if that's okay with you?

The install rebooted 2 times, and no instructions were given on what I should do next so I almost started the whole damn hour and 15 minute long installation over again before I realized you *don't* reboot with the CD after the initial install.

Upon finishing the install, I was greeted with a very unimpressive hack of the Windows XP startup screen, this time in black and white and called "Microsoft Windows, Codename Longhorn".

I was then greeted by a bunch of dialogs saying they were going to "install supplementary XP drivers that aren't yet ready for Longhorn"...

I was then asked to reboot, and found to my surprise that those "supplementary drivers" had installed the Nvidia 3D drivers by themselves.

It should be noted that this is by no means a new idea; Xandros and Linspire have offered this out of the box since about 2 years ago. Naturally, I wanted to go through my usual testing scheme, starting with Doom 3.

Much as I expected, Doom 3 installed and ran just the same as it did in MS Windows XP. There was no noticeable performance increase in Vista. The same was true for Unreal Tournament and Neverwinter Nights.

This furthers my conclusion that Vista is just a 4-year-old windowing theme for XP, nothing more.

Software Selection:

You would think that since the base install for Vista is 7 gigabytes (I have the screenshot to prove it), there would be something, anything new and exciting or even (gasp!) useful in all that. Nope. You get the usual stuff: windows media player, notepad, Internet Exploiter, and not a whole lot else.

While we're on the topic of Internet Exploiter 7.0, I find it necessary to mention that there is absolutely nothing new in this browser. It has tabs. Whoopee. Mozilla and Opera have had tabs for years.

As I was writing this rant in notepad (which also is no different, but what more can you do with a text editor? emacs fans, don't answer that) I tried previewing it in IE 7, only to find that (unsurprisingly) IE 7 still has non-standard CSS support.

Most Annoying Feature:

SYSTEM RESOURCES. Ok folks, here's the biggest beef I have with Vista: it's a resource hog. I thought 182MB worth of RAM and 18 processes while idle was bad in XP, but Vista uses (drumroll please) no less than 384MB of RAM when idle.

It also runs 35 idle processes, only 11 of which are visible to the user. One must wonder what the other 24 processes are doing.

Another thing that really bothers me about Vista is all the draconian junk they've thrown in under the hood. Trusted Computing, DRM, etc, etc all translate (to me) as less freedom for the end-user for the sake of more revenue for the partners of Microsoft.

The same goes for this OS. It's a glorified new paint job for a 5-year-old operating system that uses twice the resources and does nothing more than its predecessor.

Who's it best for?

Ok, since this is a beta I'll relent a little bit here. Betas aren't meant for the general public. However, unless Microsoft has some really killer features they're holding out on until the second beta or the final release, this OS isn't going to knock anyone's socks off unless they are one of the following groups:

  • Morons who think AOL invented the Internet
  • Morons who think a new paint job automatically makes something *better*
  • Morons
  • Pauly Shore

In short, it's pretty. It's no different than XP anywhere that it counts, except of course that it uses more system resources and its name translates to "Not so bright a person" in Latvian. (Thanks to the folks at LinuxForums for that little fact.)

It's not a "Linux killer", it's not "The Next Big Thing", it's just a sad attempt by a software company that's become too big for its own good to make people notice their OS again and sell lots of PC upgrades.