I'll post a longer rant about Windows Vista in a few more weeks (once I've had a good run with it). At this point in time there are a lot of gaps -- mostly in terms of polish and making it consistent.
Short summary of stuff so far:
1. Plan on 2Gb of RAM. It will run on 1Gb fine -- just like XP does on 512Mb. Then again it is Beta, so maybe 1Gb will be sufficient.
2. UI is still not polished, some dialogs have the old look&feel - I do not know why this is the case. But, my guess would be that there is code that directly draws the UI rather than use Win32/Aero API. This I'm certain will be corrected.
3. The so called protection features are a tad annoying, I'm most certain that they will be pretty much crippled either by M$ or by the user in the first few weeks of using it.
4. The bulk of the annoying bits are really to do with UI being inconsistent, rather than the underlying technology.
5. I've had a few problems getting Networking working properly.
6. There is still some artifact noise when dragging windows around, flipping between Windows etc. At times the whole UI becomes very very slow -- then it decides all is OK and starts being more responsive. [This again is a Beta issue, will probably change soon]. I noticed this when I was running a few apps. and tried moving between Windows when compiling a large application.
7. If the rumors of them charging US$450 for the Home-Ultimate edition are true -- this beast of an OS will never really take off. Considering that the average price of a basic PC is around US$600 -- anything more than US$100 for the O/S will be just not work.
8. Firefox runs faster and better than IE7. I hear IE8 is now the Firefox killer...
I just started to realise how polished XP really is, after playing around with Vista.
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"I just started to realise how polished XP really is, after playing around with Vista."
That's an interesting point. XP has been out a long time now and Microsoft have spent years patching it. Think of all those patches you used to have to download (which have then been rolled into a service pack). We've been through two service packs and yet more patches.
In my use of Vista I found pretty much the same annoyances. One thing however which I did think was interesting was that if it detects that an application running is slowing down the rest of the system in compositing mode, it turns it off. You lose all the aero effects, and other eye-candy features the compoisting manager has to offer (flip 3d, real time rendering), but you still get to use the old application. Closing this application will allow the compositing manager to run again.
I'll be interested to see what you have for your next review...
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