Zac Garrett

Windows Vista RC1 has been out for a while now and I’ve finally got the hardware to give it a try. So, I decided to give the latest release candidate a go.

My test subject
Sun Ultra 20
AMD Opteron 1218 Dual Core and 64bit
NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500
2gb RAM 250GB hard drive

This computer should handle just about anything that Microsoft throws at it.

Downloading
To get vista its a 3.7gig DVD ISO download which you can get Vista for free from Microsoft.
It took a few hours for me to download at work, I ended up going home
before it was done. When I got back into the office it was done and I
burnt it to a DVD, no problems thus far.

Installation
The
install was virtually painless. The first neat option was that it
wanted the serial number before you do anything. This is a first in the
Windows installers.The next step was to select which partition should I
install Vista. Since I had Linux on the computer prior the install I
had to do a little repartitioning to get it to use the entire drive.
After this it formatted and went right into the install. A few restarts
later Vista was installed.

Setup
After
the install was done it prompted me for a little bit of information to
get the computer up to speed. This was very normal stuff, time zone,
user, computer name, and some other basic stuff. Simple.

First login
The
first login took a bit of time while the computer setup the account for
the first time. No problem, almost all operating systems do this. Once
logged in the computer looks “pretty”. The first thing I do is look for
the control panel to change some appearance options. I want to make
sure to resolution is good and also change the theme a bit. They have
changed the entire format of changing settings. More options are now
hidden and almost impossible to easily find. This is fine for an
incompetent computer user, but I want to change settings… easily. It
now takes 20 clicks when it used to take 5. The setting names turned
out to be the same, but they are just harder to find. Okay, I’ve got
some basic setting stuff changed around to my liking and its time to
fireup the browser, Internet Explorer 7. Once again the options are
hidden.

There is no file menu, no edit, no help, nothing. After
a little probing I find most of the settings are still there but
hidden. It’s starting to remind me of AOL and not a real web browser.
Now that I’ve found the browser settings, lets actually start browsing
the web. Its got tabs and a search inside the browser itself, no
toolbars needed, great. I am a google addict and so I immediately
wanted to switch the search to have it use google. This was quite
simple. A few clicks and I was converted over to google. The tabs work
quite the same as firefox, no big surprises there. The one thing I did
notice just by habit, control+t brings up a new tab, but it takes two
tabs to get into the search bar. In firefox its only one. This is just
a habit of mine that could easily be fixed. The actual browsing
experience was fairly straight forward. From a web designer standpoint,
there is no simple keystroke to view the source code still. They’ve
even hidden that option too. Once you find the right location to view
the source it still opens notepad. This means no syntax highlighting or
anything cool like that. Notepad is still notepad, nothing new.

Screen Shots

Other programs
Windows
was giving me warnings about not being secure, it wanted an anti-virus
program to be installed. I went online and grabbed a copy of avast home
and it installed like normal. No issues came up with the install, quite
simple. I went to hop on MSN to give it a go, its not there. Wow, a
version of windows that finally is smart enough not to fill it with
bloatware. I did however find quite a few links to install it off of
the web. The install went quite simple, but it wanted to install a ton
of crap. There were some toolbars, rhapsody, and who knows what else.
After unchecking all unnecessary items to install, it was not that bad
to install. The program fired up right after the install with the
normal login prompts. After logging in the first thing I notice is ads,
lots and lots of ads. They are on the user menu and even on the
conversation windows. This is outrageous. The one thing that I liked
about MSN messenger was it had no native ads in it. Now its looking
more like AOL than ever before. Once again I go to find some user
settings to get timestamps on the conversations and to change some
other settings. The setting are gone. Well, not gone, but hidden. It
takes a bit to change the settings, but most of them are still there.

Admin Tools
Something
I really did like about Vista is its native admin tools. They have
tools to monitor hardware and to see exactly what it going on. Well, if
you can find these tools they are a neat feature. They are thrown in
various places, no loger can you just go into administration tools
folder and find all of the goodies.

Problems
While
trying to install Java I took a screenshot and opened up paint to save
it. The java install failed for some reason and paint closed on me.
Then all of the sudden windows explorer shutdown. Thirty seconds later
Windows restarted without any sort of warning. The error logs showed
nothing, so I really have no idea why it couldn’t recover from this
problem. This is not supposed to happen in XP, much less Vista.

Conclusion
Windows
Vista seems like the AOL browser turned into an operating system. It
looks nice, but if you want to do much good luck finding it. You can
easily do many basic functions, but to do anything semi-advanced its a
pain in the ass. I do not look forward to the day I have to support
Vista. It is a pain to do anything with that is not checking email and
browsing the web. Yes, it looks good, but it stops there. The operating
system itself is a playskool OS. This OS is not going to breed any good
techs, its just going to keep people from learning what a computer can
really do.