03-22-2006, 08:43 AM
Somehow one of my professors got a hold of a Windows Vista beta release. I got to play around with it for a little while and this is my impression of it. First of all Windows users will be happy to know the the BSOD "feature" is still part of Vista. 
Being a beta release I was expecting that though, I got it trying to attach a USB drive.
Windows Vista has some really cool visual features and some really ugly ones. First the Windows border is really nice, its a nice semi transparent border, but MS is having some trouble getting the blending right and occasionally got some really strange results, it might have been a hardware incompatability though. The windows' buttons look really out of place though. They look like a bad QB Gui's buttons. Moving and resizing the windows was SLOW, but I was using a professional computer with a slow graphics card.
The sidebar is a cross between the Mac's dock and the Mac's dashboard. There is a quicklaunch feature and has a few Widgets.
Vista's windows seem to be displayed using DirectX's 3d functions because you can get a isometric view of all windows so that you can even see ones in the background. This is probably designed to work like the Expose function on the Mac, but it doesn't work nearly was well. This version used Ctrl + the Windows Key to do this, but I heard that later version will have a special key on the keyboard.
There is finally a DVD burner. It seems to run like a cross between iDVD and Windows Movie Maker. It doesn't work at the moment and for some reason shuts down when I opened the DVD drive to put a new one in.
The new Internet Explorer looks as bad as the last version. It is much bulkier, but I saw very little new features. My professor told me that it was tabbed, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. It still acts like a superhighway for Spyware.
The version of Media Player 11 that was on this computer doesn't have nearly any features. It plays music and thats it, I'm sure they will add the movies back on (they better) but the music player looks almost just like WMP10. They centred the buttons, they are set up in a Quicktime way. There is supposedly a sound enhancer, but it still doesn't sound as good as iTunes (which doesn't work on Vista yet.)
Final thoughts: Vista looks better than Windows XP, but still doesn't have the visual appeal of OS X. For a beta release it was very stable and I wouldn't expect the final release to crash very often. There is a major amount of security in Vista, but it is still very seseptible to spyware. Some of the new programs and features were very obviously influenced by both Apple and Stardock software.
Being a beta release I was expecting that though, I got it trying to attach a USB drive. Windows Vista has some really cool visual features and some really ugly ones. First the Windows border is really nice, its a nice semi transparent border, but MS is having some trouble getting the blending right and occasionally got some really strange results, it might have been a hardware incompatability though. The windows' buttons look really out of place though. They look like a bad QB Gui's buttons. Moving and resizing the windows was SLOW, but I was using a professional computer with a slow graphics card.
The sidebar is a cross between the Mac's dock and the Mac's dashboard. There is a quicklaunch feature and has a few Widgets.
Vista's windows seem to be displayed using DirectX's 3d functions because you can get a isometric view of all windows so that you can even see ones in the background. This is probably designed to work like the Expose function on the Mac, but it doesn't work nearly was well. This version used Ctrl + the Windows Key to do this, but I heard that later version will have a special key on the keyboard.
There is finally a DVD burner. It seems to run like a cross between iDVD and Windows Movie Maker. It doesn't work at the moment and for some reason shuts down when I opened the DVD drive to put a new one in.
The new Internet Explorer looks as bad as the last version. It is much bulkier, but I saw very little new features. My professor told me that it was tabbed, but I couldn't figure out how to do it. It still acts like a superhighway for Spyware.
The version of Media Player 11 that was on this computer doesn't have nearly any features. It plays music and thats it, I'm sure they will add the movies back on (they better) but the music player looks almost just like WMP10. They centred the buttons, they are set up in a Quicktime way. There is supposedly a sound enhancer, but it still doesn't sound as good as iTunes (which doesn't work on Vista yet.)
Final thoughts: Vista looks better than Windows XP, but still doesn't have the visual appeal of OS X. For a beta release it was very stable and I wouldn't expect the final release to crash very often. There is a major amount of security in Vista, but it is still very seseptible to spyware. Some of the new programs and features were very obviously influenced by both Apple and Stardock software.