O’Reilly’s DevCenter is featuring an in-depth look at Windows Vista Beta 1. Their conclusion? “Surprisingly, this build of Windows Vista is pretty stable, and the performance is quite good.”
An In-Depth Look at Vista, Part 1
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Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive • Web Developer • Father • Foodie • Music Snob • OS enthusiast
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Once again, still waiting to see something that’s actually NEW and ORIGINAL. I have a feeling that I’m going to be very dissapointed.
In the standard normal distribution that is the marketplace, Windows targets the fat middle, where the rule is “don’t surprise me”.
If you want to venture out into the right tail where the action is, see distrowatch.com and try something wierd.
..Is the wasted space in the UI. Massive text and icons, vast amounts of whitespace, etc.. There is a line that UI designers need to learn to draw between functional and pretty. For example, look at Page 3, Figure 11. What purpose does that massive magnifying glass serve?
I’m not against having attractive user interfaces, but this is an operating system – not an artist portfolio site.
If MS only gave us a way to develop and use our own UI, without having to hack at it for a few years before we can come up with something basic..
Looks to me like… The wasted color space makes use of different colors; I think they’re trying to help people narrow things down based on remembering a color.
“I can’t find my document.”
“What did the folder look like that it was in?”
“Well, it was green.”
“Ok, it was in a dynamic folder; let me help you find it..”
See?
Wasted space for a power user, yes. Wasted space for newbs; nah. Besides, too much functionality on a newbs screen seems to confuse them
.
Good point.
However, hopefully they give us a way to take out the extra crap like that. I don’t want to feel like I’m a kid playing with a fisher-price toy when I’m running a search on my HD for that mpg of the guy who crapped himself trying to light his farts..
I think the same thing when I see KDE, but luckily I have the option to choose Gnome instead..
I still look forward to try Vista. Everybody here does. We all want to try something new and exciting.. But still, it’s fun to laugh at Microsoft…?
Well, you kinda can make your own UI. There are many different shells available for download.
As far as the big magnifying glass and such, I’ve not seen that view, and it’s definately not the default.
That’s the first thing I noticed too. It god-awful ugly and non-functional. There is probably an option to change it though.
Ok, i’m sure Vista is stable BUT when it will be released you will see that like Windows XP there will be many malwares and it will not be stable anymore :p
Does that mean less ads?
Serious,is the new policy mechanism still not implemented or just not tested by many?
well i was taught that if i dont hav anything nice to say, dont say anything. so all i can say about M$ is Hasta La Vista!!!
I really wonder what deep means for the reviewer to write that long one-liner conclusion.
No information why he didnt get Aero to work or what kind of hardware he was using.
Its always good to watch some pictures. What would be an article about screenshots.
If you looked farther down the page for related links, you might notice part 2. In part the author discusses the situation succinctly.
You just gotta have video drivers that support the Longhorn Video Driver Model (LVDM).
As I keep saying: all Longhorn/Vista is, is a new desktop for Windows NT. Vista is to Windows NT as KDE is to Linux. It’s all eye candy and whiz-bang GUI features. Tell me what’s new about the underlying operating system in areas such as, say, security?
What can you say about a review which starts out by crowing about how pretty the new wallpaper looks? This “in-depth look” focuses only on the GUI. It doesn’t examine any of the internals. Vista will ship with IE 7 and WMP 10. Whoop-de-doo! Tell me what’s been done about IE’s much-publicized security problems.
So far I don’t see a reason to migrate from Windows 2000.
To Mr Anonymous (IP: 64.81.86.—) Troll.
Why don’t you go read about these things that you are so interested in knowing about, instead of showing your ignorance here on OSNews?
There is enough published by Microsoft on their website to tell you about what is new for Vista besides the eyecandy that you seem to like so much.
Complain all you want, but please do so after you have looked up the facts rather than taking things from under your bridge.
To Mr. Anonymous2 (IP: 213.100.39.—)
While I may not concur with the original poster, I have to say that according to this (and several other) article, one could well reach that conclusion.
As many of the expected features get “postponed”, In depth seems to start losing its meaning. Many of these reviews seem to focus exactly on:
a. Changes to the desktop
b. Virtual Folders
c. The absence of Aero / Looking for Eye-candy
d. Nothing more.
Sure, it doesn’t mean Vista won’t have some nice features under the hood… but, sorry, the reviews don’t speak about that stuff at all.
Personally I don’t understand why all these sites decide to review this beta. It’s not an end user beta; it’s a developer beta. And I have yet to see a developer centric review of it.
You would think that a “DevCenter” would have a developer centric review, but I don’t see any of that in it. Maybe I’m just blind.
Of course, the situation doesn’t get better when these sites neglect to tell the people visiting that it’s intended for developers.
And it certainly doesn’t get better with certain people pretending to care about what is really new under the hood, yet clearly shows that they only want a reason to troll.
Obviously it’s unimpressive and rubbish because it’s Windows. It can’t possibly be any good.
Clone X with a different look-a-like !
I keep seeing people like the one doing this review refer to Aero. There is no Aero in beta1 just some translucent window borders called Aero glass but not the Avalon based Aero UI. There is a Theme called Aero to but it is just a place holder till beta2 and for the people with very old hardware
Glad to see that they streamlined Windows Media Player in Vista. To me, the default XP version is just a disaster.
I’m so tired of seeing Vista articles already. This is what makes Windows so big—the hype. It’s not innovation or quality, just hype. They talk about stuff with codenames (Chicago, Longhorn, etc.) to get rumors about it started. Then, they announce a far-away release date, and we just sit around and read articles for a year or more until it’s actually released. By the way, most of these articles usually say the same things over and over again (do the words “In Depth Look” ring a bell anyone?). We also get the privilege of looking at the same screenshots over and over again (look here it is in widescreen… ooo!ahh!). Pure hype and I’m getting tired of it.
And there is nothing bitter, open sores, dirt hippys can do about it. But they’re crying is always good for a laugh. Linux has failed on the desktop.
“Linux has failed on the desktop.”
May be true. But Windows is a faliure everywhere else.
Really guys, the thing that ticks me off more than anything else, is that Vista is a total rip-off of OSX! Hey now, I’m no Apple fan. Linux is still my OS of choice. However, I use WinXP once in a while, and OSX at work.
About a week ago I had a chance to use a machine running Vista. The load times were about the same as Windows XP, and over all it seemed to be an attempt at making somthing that could compare to OSX. The problem is, I don’t think they could even reach that goal. Now with the OpenGL junk they just announced, I’m hoping Vista is a flop. I think it might just be…
It won’t be a flop, since all oems are gonna install vista the moment it ships.
I hope they keep on installing xp instead of vista though, but the chances are slim.
It looks nice (to me it now looks as the most beautifull desktop around, os X is not beauty in my eyes), but I don’t get it with the search stuff. Is it easy? probably, but how can you manage all files you have? when you don’t know where they are, you don’t even know what file you have on your system, cause you only find the files you’re looking for. A pc is not the internet, finding files is necessary, but managing folders will always be top-priority. I’m not interested in having my system full of junk I don’t want on my pc. But than again, I’m a linux fan for something :-). I like a clean pc, not a pigstable.
“Surprisingly, this build of Windows Vista is pretty stable, and the performance is quite good.” Hahaha. Mr. Wei-Meng Lee from MSDN has a good sense of humor. I’ve never seen an OS run that slow and that on a Pentium 630 3.0 GHz. Regarding stability don’t even get me started…
Who cares, the proprietary Dr. Pentium architecture is a dead end. AMD won, get over it. And in a few years the proprietary Microseft piece of shit Windows Vista system will become completely irrelevant once people realise they’re paying for a turd when they could be running Linux/BSD for free.
So the author is surprised that Vista isn’t totally shit as he imagined.
Just wait until they bundle Trusted Computing in.
good info about windows vista – longhorn is here: <a href=”http://windows-vista.host.sk“>windows-vista.host.sk
$ diff vista.txt linux.txt
Installation was straightforward…
< Note that if you don’t have you drive formatted the right way it will fail
> …once you choose how to format your drive and what packages you want
…feature might confuse beginners but power users will like it
Some features didn’t work…
< probably because I didn’t have the right hardware
> probably because Linux is not ready for the desktop
The most important feature for users is definitely
< the ability to search for where you put your documents
> the complete stack of desktop applications included out of the box
And to make this more flexible, the OS also has
< a utility to symbolically link to your documents
> a utility that can install thousands of additional applications without searching the web
which might confuse new users since this is an alien concept in the Windows world.
The included web browser supports tabs and will not be discussed in depth because
< it is ugly, insecure, and anyone who knows what they are doing will use an alternative
> you and most of your friends and family already use it
I’m not reviewing any additional software for the OS, because
< there isn’t any that supports the new proprietary SDK
> there’s just too much, and I only spent, like, 30 minutes playing around with it before posting to my blog
In summary, this OS was surprisingly stable and performed reasonably well
< on my brand new desktop
> on my spare 400MHz Pentium II I keep in the basement
While it is not entirely feature-complete, this release is promising for the feature. For now,
< I can hardly wait for Windows Vista!!
> I can only wait for Linux to solve its few nagging shortcomings and be ready for the desktop…
$ rm vista.txt linux.txt
$ echo “There is no such thing as a good OS review” >> list_of_truths.txt
The text didn’t really give me more information than the provided screenshots did.
Anyways. I’m more interested to know if they have fixed some of the really annoying things that they have kept ignoring ever since win95.
For example, if I copy 30 000 files from one place to another will it still cancel the whole operation if file number 26 352 isn’t readable?
Will the install allow me to supply it with optional drivers on a CD or USBStick instead of requiring a floppy drive?
Those and all the other little really annoying things that should have been fixed ages ago are really amusing to see in a major product in the year 2005.
New features are cool, but I hope that they have been paying some attention to the stuff that hasn’t been working right for 10 years.
Yes, the fixed the file copy problem.
As of right now, you can get drivers off the CD, didn’t really see anything about USB sticks though. I didn’t bother loading my SCSI drivers either, but the option for the CD is there.
Ah, excellent. Good to hear that they are finally paying attention to details.
I only use windows for one dedicated application myself though so desktop usability isn’t a problem for me normally. But whenever I have to help someone with their windows install I feel my blood pressure raising again because of all the little wierd decisions they made and the things they forgot to add to the todo-list.
Well Vista has already had an effect on my purchasing plans …
At the moment I have an aging (ie. the ‘S’ key is starting to play up) Asus laptop running XP-Pro and an aging desltop running XP-Home.
My plans “were” to flip the XP-Home box across to something like Ubunto, donate the laptop to the Salvation Army, buy a Mac-Mini and a new laptop (I need it for work so it would be another Windows box).
This was all going to happen this month, but IF I’m buying a Windows laptop I’ve decided to wait until Vista is released to get it ‘free’ .. evn though I KNOW it’s not gonna do anything more for me than XP.
BUT because of that, I can’t donate the old Laptop and move the desktop across to Linux (after all I have to have at least 1 machine which has a functioning ‘S’ key) … so the Mac-Mini takes a bath (can’t think of why – just feel wrong to buy one until I move the desktop to Linux).
All of this for a piece of shaftware which isn’t gonna change my life in any significant way ….
No operating system alone is going to revolutionize computing anymore, those days were over ages ago. Nobody including MS is foolish enough to expect their customers to toss all existing software and hardware, and invest in retraining an entire generation of employees to adapt to a massive change.
From a purely corporate point of view, the less change in design the better.
I see no mension of that. Even when it might well be the greatest (excuse for) new feature. I mean it’s not like one should be able and use a product as they see fit, right?
From this review, it looks like the ‘Feature Guys’ went crazy, while the ‘Usability’ guys were on vacation.
For example, a windows explorer with *three* main colums (and another 4 for a grand 7 in total)??
Well, didn’t you notice:
– the ‘installed games’ overview, complete with the ERGB (or whatever it is it’s called) ratings (teen-mature – violence – what-have-you-not)
– the ‘parental controls’
– the ‘shop for music online’ button
– …
I would bet on it these are going to be tied to ‘nifty’ DRM stuff, of course in close co-operation with Hollywood, RIAA, MPAA, etcetera… if not right away in Vista, then in one of its next ‘incarnations’
Looking at desktop environments, I see them growing more complex. Take Windows, Gnome, KDE. They might be good for experienced user (don’t mean expert), but they are not good for user with simple needs, like email, web browsing, text writing and printing.
I have a problem with this, configuring computers for my parents. Environments implement some internal logic that gets in the way of user with low requirements.
Particular problem is integrated file manager. I mean, the whole environment behaves like a file manager. It is easy to make a mistake and delete or displace something.
DG