Its finally here whether you are ready or not. Vista beta 2 was publically released about a week ago, and since then I have had a very interesting time with it. I have alot of stories which I probably won't want to type out because they are so involved, however, I still have a great wealth of information about it. Installation started out simply enough by inserting the CD and booting from that. One thing that I noticed at this point was the strong lack of blue in the next couple of screens. In fact, the install screen from XP has been completey replaced with a new version that features a nice easy-to-use GUI for you to install with. It basically does the same things, but now looks better. Another obvious drawback with this system of installation is loadtimes. besides having to load numerous drivers for the program to interface with any given computer, it has to initialize a 16 bit graphical interface which easily took 10 minutes to finish. All of that aside though, the program wil likely seem much more aproachable to the average computer user. (Sorry, I'm lazy and its a borrowed picture) When you actually enter Windows, you do the usual stuff like setting your usernames and (basic) preferences, after which it will log you on. When I finally got to this point, I spent about 5 seconds inside the OS until i saw this friendly little reminder that let me know that I was using a genuine windows product: Error The BSOD actually looks like this in vista even though I just borrowed that from an XP installation. Its nice to know that microsoft wants to keep some familiarity with existing Windows products alive. But getting back to the point (and reality) this is of course, a beta version. i expected bugs like this from the start. After several boots that ended up the same way, I was surprised to see that vista actually paied attention to what was going on and disabled the new Sidebar, which was apparently causing the problem. It gave me a warning that looked something like this: Sidebar? What Sidebar? In case you aren't exactly "up" on all of the "improvements" that Vista offers, this is the one that wasn't specifically documented that really surprised me. You know that a similar error in XP would probably just happen over and over in a never ending loop forcing you to repair or reinstall (not fun). While we are on the subject of improvements in vista, I should mention that there aren't many other ones to be found. Nothing that will really increase productivity anyways. There are sevral of these "features" that you might notice right from the beginning, including but not limited to: The "Aero" style desktop that comes with Vista 3D window scrolling The "Aero" style desktop that comes with Vista Live thumbnail window views (taskbar and ALT+TAB) The "Aero" style desktop that comes with Vista Internet Explorer 7 And let's not forget... The "Aero" style desktop that comes with Vista In case you havn't already noticed, the "Aero" desktop enhancement was not put up there four times by accident, in fact this requirement was mandated by Microsoft. They contacted me and indicated that if I or anyone I hear talks about Vista, they must mention "Aero" at least four times to get the persons attention. When asked why by myself, Microsoft did not return my question. Actually that's not what happened, but I am surprised that Microsoft has not done that yet. I find it very anoying the way they push this new look because in truth, it really does nothing more than look pretty. the same pretty much goes for the 3D windows and live thumbnail views, because they don't actually help you do ANYTHING. In fact, (If I am allowed to skew off onto a tanget here for a second) I violently oppose this new look to Windows. From my perspective, I have nothing to gain from it, and niether do the other couple million average joes out there that upgrade thier system only when they get their new Dell to replace an aging Pentium III system with 256 mb of RAM. It seems like too many people out there in the computer business are taking this "upgrade" in stride, when they should be opposed to it. Microsoft has been the dominant PC OS supplier for years now, no one would disagree with you there. The problem is that every time they put out a new OS they force everyone to do things their way, upgrading and paying as is necessary to keep the newest, hottest version of Windows on their system no matter what the cost. Very often it ends up being people that are too ignorant about the technology to understand exactly what they are doing. Ahem, BESIDES this highly touted look, Vista also has a revamped version of Internet Explorer 7 and better security features. Internet explorer 7 really is today what it should have been and could have been years ago, an updated surfing tool that allows tabbed browsing with less malicious hacking attempts on the part of those trying to gain acess to a system. For those keeping score, Firefox has been doing this for a while now and in many respects the new features in IE7 are not really that different from the current version of Firefox. The new security features in Vista look promising on the surface, and in many ways they are. As much as I would like to bash Microsoft for a lack thereof, I can't. However these new security warnings tend to become slightly cumbersome when they pop up every time you try to do something useful with the system that utilizes a Windows-sanctioned program. Many of these warning tend to wind up looking like this: It's...very...secure. As you can see in the following picture, Vista incorporates a "rating" system for the computer that its on. This is to determine what types of future aplications you may want to run on your system. Despite not getting a score lower than a 3.9, vista somehow gave my system an overall average of 3, which I can only assume is out of 10 points (this is not explicitly described in the help file, and the terms on which this grade is given seem vague at best). If I were to simply average those numbers, my system would have a rating of 5 exactly. Somehow something seems not right with that. 3? Speaking of system ratings, you should also know that Vista takes hefty system requirements to run it in Aero mode. Specs are around the ring of a 2.4ghz intel processor or the equivalent AMD type, 1GB of system RAM, and a "modern" 256mb graphics card in order to process the effects that Aero gives you. When talking with another person at length about Vista, he was almost certian that anyone out there should be able to run vista with what they have, and that if they didn't have it, they wouldn't deserve to be running it. This was after telling him that one of my friends still runs on a system using integrated graphics that has only 512 mb of RAM. If you need any further proof of this conundrum, I sugest that you take a quick look at this chart from a PC magazine article on Vista detailing compatibility with older computers. For those of you who refuse to believe it...(Taken from PC Mag) I tend to consider PC Magazine to be very biased towards Microsoft because of their often too-promotional articals about thier hardware and software (namely a certian operating system and videogame console), so its pretty bad they would admit this up front. Lastly, one of the things I noticed was that the Vista bootloader is completely different this time around. Probably for the nbest, Microsoft has chosen not to store it in an easily acessable text file to keep it hidden from viruses and such, the downside to that being that now you must go through an insanely complicated process of booting your system in dos mode and running a non-user friendly program to edit the files. if this is too much for you, you can simply go into the properties panel for booting within Vista and easily choose which OS you want to boot first, however you can't edit the name. This was a bit annoying since it detected Windows XP as "An Earlier Version of Windows." You'd think that it would be smarter than that, figuring that alot of people who use it would be dual booting XP and Vista. Apparently that was not the case. Other than these problems, Vista looks like a solid Service Pack for Windows XP Operating System from our old friends. Now if you will excuse me, I need to reboot my Vista machine. If I let it sit for too long without doing anything, it tends to crash because of problems with NTFS.sys. (BETA. Its a beta.... gotta keep telling myself that.) (Also, I see no reason to comment on DX10. Since it is most definitly not ready, it was not included in the beta relase and I therefore have no experience with it.) -------------------------------------------------------------------------- *Pictures linked because they didnt fit *A few pictures missing as of 9:59am *This article posted in tandem on my site: site