I have been messing around a bit with Vista Beta 2, as I wrote last week. After the first hurdles of getting it installed properly and finding some drivers that work with my hardware, I also installed Office 2007 beta, SnagIT (for the screenshots I use here) and MSN Live. The more I play around with Vista, the more I feel it is going to be a big culture shock to most XP users. Also it feels like the system (especially the Ultimate version of build 5384) is bloathed with unessecary options and features that really makes this system sluggish and in fact mostly unworkable on my PC. If the finished product is *anywhere* near this beta 2 build 5384, then I’ll have to pass on it: you obviuously need a *monster pc* to make it work decently. To Microsofts defense I should add that by now there is already a built 5456 and according to Paul Thurrott’s Supersite for Windows, that should have been the build that Microsoft should have released to the bigger public through the Community Public Preview (CPP). Unfortunately I do not have that build; however I am downloading 5456 as I blog this, so I hope to continue my reviews based on that build.
Anyway, for now lets continue my assessment of build 5384.
Here is what I found so far after messing with Vista all weekend:
Negative:
- Vista 5384 overall performance is just crap: I got a 2.2gb swapfile just running a few programs; in comparison: my XP hardly breaks out a sweat doing more (swap: 400-700mb)
- Performance rating of my PC is only 3 on the Vista performance rating scale (thanks for reminding me my PC is already obsolete Microsoft)
- Startup is 10x longer than XP professional on my pc
- Dual monitor support sucks: it’s slow as shit
- Media Center setup starts in 720i mode: I had to attach another monitor to even be able to set it up (this is really dumb Micrsosoft)
- Media Center does not recognize my TV-card (Medion, based in Philips hardware) – I probably will be able to fix this
- security center does not recognize virusscanner Trend-Micro PC-cillin
- Vista tells me it’s ‘shutting down’ while I am trying to ‘restart’
- Stabilty issues: restarting my Pc either ends in a blue screen or Vista warns me at the start-up that it did not shut down properly
- Confusing interface for setting up your network (unless you have DHCP)
- Slow Internet conncetion
- My webcam (Philips) isn’t recognized (XP doesn’t even need a driver for it: it works there out of the box)
- UAC (User Account Control) drives you nuts and will make you turn it of thus potentially making your PC unsafe
So, what I do like (more or less):
- Being used to OS X, I more or less like the extra eye-candy of the GUI (I know: it does not make your PC any faster)
- Overall crispy clear modern look & feel (guess a matter of taste)
- IE 7 browsing is an improvement to IE 6, I like the tabbed browsing and the ‘expose’ like feature in IE (Firefox users know this a an extension called ‘Foxpose’).
- Sidebar is nice and seems pretty unintrusive
- The new backgrounds 🙂
As far as the eye-candy: most of it is actually functional and will help you have a better ‘experience’. For instance: minimized windows will show a live preview when you hover over them (playing movie, file progress bar etc.). This also works when you either alt-tab through windows or use the new option ‘windows-key with tab’.
Ok, so you notice the list of dislikes is a lot bigger then the likes so far. I just hope the reports about build 5456 are true and Microsoft redeems itself with that build. Off course beta testing usually involves some frustration because, well, it’s a beta.
Anyway: I am giving Micrsosoft the benefit of the doubt and will see if it gets better with 5456. So I hope to continue my reviews here.
