TechieMoe.com

Introduction:

Microsoft's latest long-awaited OS is nearing its time in the sun, for better or worse. Being the naturally curious fellow that I am I long ago signed up for an MSDN free membership which entitles me to download pre-release versions of Vista for testing and feedback purposes.

The latest one I received was Release Candidate 2, the "final beta" of Vista before it is slated to be sold next month. Are they going to make the deadline? Let's see.

Install:

The entire feel of the installer and the first few boots told me this OS was significantly more solid than the previous release I tried.

Upon my first boot the thing that was most obvious to me was the sidebar. It's essentially a clear box on the right side of the screen that holds widgets. Well... Microsoft calls them Gadgets. Whatever.

If you've used Konfabulator or Dashboard you know what I'm talking about. The thing that bugged me was they were sitting on top of everything taking up a significant part of the screen and there was no obvious way to hide them, so I had to close each "Gadget" individually.

Interestingly enough, my USB thumb drive did *not* work. I plugged it in and Vista said it was installing drivers, then errored out saying that the device was not successfully installed.

My scanner might have worked if I'd downloaded the proper drivers from Canon, but no drivers were available out of the box.

Playing with IE 7, three words kept running through my head, "Too...much...crap..." The visuals on Vista in general are WAY overdone and after a while your eyes just start to block things out. It's like the interface was designed by a carnival worker.

As I was playing around there was one thing that I was quite pleasantly surprised about: privileges. Once I was done with most of my testing I felt like I'd have a little fun and try to seriously screw up my install of Vista.

In XP or below, I could usually do this by randomly deleting files from my C:\Windows\System32 directory. In Vista I was stopped by a dialog asking me for Administrator credentials. Good. It's about freaking time this feature showed up.

Software Selection:

MP3, WMV and MPG media playback was included, not that that's exactly surprising. Along with all those nifty features are the under-the-hood DRM "improvements" as well. They're not obvious to the user, which is probably the idea.

There are a couple new games, such as Mahjongg Titans, along with the usual (though revamped) Solitaire and Minesweeper.

Aside from that though there still isn't any built-in antivirus, office software, alternate web browsers, or anything else that would make this 8 gigabyte default install seem less... well... bloated.

I can install Fedora Core or openSuSE with *everything* selected and not pass 5 GB, not to mention I'd end up with loads more useful software. But then I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here.

Most Annoying Feature:

The thing uses between 400 and 600 Megabytes of RAM while idle. The smaller your desktop resolution the less RAM it uses. Every time you launch a game it looks for 3D acceleration and if you don't have it you get an annoying popup telling you so.

There is no way to turn this off to my knowledge, but I guess Microsoft is just assuming everyone who shells out $500 for Vista will have shelled out the other $500 worth of new components they need to run it.

Who's it best for?

Having now seen this close-to-production release of Vista I see that Microsoft has indeed been doing work. This release actually felt like a stable, slick looking OS. Nevermind the fact that it's an enormous resource hog that comes with very little software out of the box. Did I enjoy my time playing with Vista Ultimate? Yes. Would I pay what Microsoft is asking for it? Not on your life.

I see the home users lapping this one up, mostly in the form of new Dells or HPs that come pre-loaded. I don't see businesses adopting it any time soon because it's very expensive and won't run on anything other than the newest of hardware.

Not to mention that XP is still under official support. There are businesses still running Windows 2000, for goodness' sake. How Microsoft plans on convincing these people to not only update their OSes but also all their hardware is beyond me.

Long story short: will Microsoft make money off of Vista? Of course. Anything with Microsoft on it is going to get some poor schmuck to buy it. Is it the "death" of all other OSes? Absolutely not.

There's nothing notable in Vista that hasn't already been done (and done *better*) in either Linux or Mac OS X. Last I checked Mac OS X was $129, and Linux was free. To me, either one of these is a much better deal.