It sure is pretty.

Eye candy isn't what I'm after, though. Performance, rock-solid operation, and interoperability are what I want.

The machine is an older Pentium 4 running at 2.4GHz with only 768MB of RAM, and an old GeForce FX 5600 video card (with 128MB RAM, I think). Vista is installed on an 80G IDE HDD. There's room to improve. It's well above the minimum specs for Vista of 800MHz and 512MB RAM, and even over the recommended 1GHz CPU. I am short of the recommended 1GB RAM, but I'm not going to upgrade just for the beta; the machine didn't need it before, and it'll probably end up running LINUX again in the end anyway.

Vista didn't perform as well as I'd like. Its self-protection seems to be through paranoid alerts and forced user responsibility (which will still result in non-technical users clicking "OK" anyway). Nothing I did caused the system to hang or crash. On one reboot it failed to leave the "shutting down" screen, even though I took the time to hit the restroom. It did follow that with the normal "Windows didn't shut down correctly" warning, but started just fine.

The bulk of the obvious changes are to the UI. It's what we see, so I understand putting some work behind making it pleasant and easy to work with. Undertanding that this is a Beta, and pre-pre-release, it isn't so easy. I also looked for changes in the configuration, including network and driver management, and some of the user functions. I didn't find any new inter-OS connectivity, and, infact, it doesn't install TELNET by default either! PuTTY to the rescue, I guess.

The GUI is massively different. The window frames got larger. At first this disturbed me as I'd rather have the real estate for the window contents. I realized quickly that they made the frames larger so they could add the "glass" effect. The edges of the windows are semi-transparent (configurable) by default. This does actually soften them a little, allowing windowed windows to ease the separation from each other.

The window controls like sizing and the corner buttons are all still there, just changed a little. Windows, and most of the heavier X environments, still beat the Mac here; the Mac has only one tab in the lower right corner of a window from which you can resize it, which is a pain if it's off the screen or otherwise obscured as you have to bring the window to the front or move it around before resizing. The ubiquitous menu beneath the title bar has changed.

The Explorer address bar has changed to a cool multi-level selector, where each bit of the path is offered as a drop-down selection tool allowing instant repathing at any of the levels. It also acts as a feedback when the window is opened to a directory; a progress bar works its way across the address bar as it discovers items, loads icons for the view, and, presumably, gathers information for the now-at-the-bottom display of file properties. I didn't find it too different, but the new goodies weren't instantly intuitive, either. It didn't take very long, but there were little frustrations before I figured out these little gems.

The windows weren't terribly responsive, however.

The windows very often, to the point of calling it "normal," respond to mouse-clicks very poorly. The first click seems to select the control on which it's used, and a second is required to activate it. This is annoying when clicking, for example, a "next" button during an install. Also, after clicking, there's little feedback that anything has happened, resulting often in "newbie-like" multiple openings of programs and documents.

One thing I noticed, and don't like, in Explorer was that very often selecting a file would cause a delay as it tried to gather the information about the file. It would display this information on the bottom of the window, much like XP displays some information on the left side in the right view. This was bad because it blocked the Explorer window from doing anything, especially moving or deleting the file, until it finished getting the information for display. This should really be done out of band, in a controlled way that can be cancelled, as in the case where the file is moved or quickly de-selected.

Another thing that happened too much for my liking was that actions that may compromise the machine would pop up a warning and confirmation dialog. Not only would it do that, but it would grey the screen, enabling only the dialog to be interacted with. This greying was not unlike the greying that XP does when logging off, but it wasn't as refined. The monitor would blink, as if the resolution were changing, turn black, then come back to a faded out screen with only one bright window. Additionally, there were often several dialogs that would do this for executing one program. Sure, these were installation programs, and most of them were unsigned (why?), so there was a "do you trust?" query, a "allow system update" query, and often another "system changing" confirmation. All with the same full-screen disruption.

The new version is way fat. At idle the machine is using over 900MB of RAM (most of that virtual), with an amazing 80MB real and 150MB virtual RAM for the GUI! 230MB just to show some windows. Turning off the glass effect and dropping the background image did nothing to reduce this abuse. The next largest program was Explorer running just under 50MB total, which still seems pretty fat to me. The same machine, booted to Windows XP, uses less than 200MB idle, for the whole deal, including a bunch of wasteful taskbar helpers that I haven't taken the time to get rid of. Before I wiped it out, the SuSE running on the same box would only be using a little over 100MB when running KDE, with a near realtime updating background (xearth), a news ticker on the task bar, and a number of unnecessary applets and programs running at startup.

The base install, of course, included nothing. As mentioned in the installation post, I had some trouble even getting the network card loaded. I downloaded a Windows XP driver for the Linksys (motherboard) Ethernet controller. The installation went smoothly, and the network activated. Almost instantly Vista started searching for, finding, and updating the other bits of hardware that it didn't install from the start. It also updated the network driver to a chipset driver instead of the WinXP vendor version. Without rebooting (yay!) there was sound, and and Internet.

Just to see what would happen, I plugged in my new Smartphone. It was instantly recognized, and the Vista version of ActiveSync was downloaded without prompting, although I did have to approve it's alteration of the system. I was instantly able to browse the contents of the phone (a few documents I'd infrared-transferred from my Palm). The phone didn't complain, and Vista just let me unplug the USB at will. I couldn't find the Sync program in the Start menu, but it reappeared as soon as I plugged the phone in.

While I was looking for the sync software, I got distracted by a green icon that looked like the same one, but was for Windows Media Center, which led me to find another goofy thing with the machine's TV tuner card. Some time ago I got one so we could suck some animation from video tape. It's a low-end, and now old PCI card from Hauppauge. It was one of the nicer cards available at the time, but they don't sell it any more, much less plan to support it in Vista, apparently. Vista did, however, recognize the device and load drivers for it. Oddly, the Media Center software doesn't recognize the tuner. Alas, the WinXP drivers and software for this card don't work either. Sadly they're installed and won't uninstall. Whoops.

What's goofy (and annoying) about it is that every once in a while it kicks out some audio from the tuner card. Obviously the noise is coming from a television show (at one point morning talk show, and another a commercial for Chevrolet, if I recall correctly). Can't see the card with the software, but it does make it through the mixer with no prompting.

Out of the box, as the Mac-v-PC ads point out, there are no really useful applications. Some games, some sidebar applets, and the Media Center seem to be their out-of-box experience. At the same time as this beta, however, Microsoft is offering Office 2007 Beta software. I downloaded a bunch of the Office bits I use, including Project and Visio, and some new toys, like One Note and Groove. I haven't done more than download all of the bits and install some of them, so look forward to a future installment with those impressions.

Downloading was a bit of an ordeal. The site from which the programs are downloaded would only allow me to download two at a time (I'd thought to fire up all of them and go to bed), which is not really Vista's fault. I foolishly waited for one to finish before starting another. Using IE 7 (also beta), is very much like the other IEs to date, except it has tabs, and all of the Vista window goodies. Once a download is complete, the "copy from temporary" window appears, and gives some additional information about the copy process which was interesting. There's still the intolerable "long last second" problem; it got down to 0 bytes remaining to copy with 0 seconds to go, but the window would not change to indicate it was complete for about another minute after it hit that point. This happened for of the Office bits I downloaded, as well as the other downloads.

Vista doesn't come with even a cursory anti-virus software, although there is a spyware monitor and firewall. Only one anti-virus (also beta) for Vista is offered from the Microsoft website. The TrendMicro anti-virus seemed as good as any, and better than none. Upon installation (thankfully I waited for the other downloads to finish first), the firewall included with the anti-virus software stopped allowing my PC from accessing the Internet. Thanks for that protection. A few too many clicks through unfamiliar software, and I was able to find out that I had to change the network profile; a feature which is available from the right-click context menu on the taskbar. Once Internet access was restored, the software promptly started updating itself; didn't I just download the latest and greatest?

With the anti-virus running, the machine had only occasional additional hesitations, as it scans files being used, I imagine. The memory didn't seem to change much, so it either fit inside otherwise allocated memory, or something shrunk a little to let it in.

I also downloaded Visual Studio Express for C#, J#, and their web tool (FrontPage/InterDev replacement?). I fired up one of the setup programs before I left for work; it took too long for it to open, so I figured I'd finish that when I got home.

One interesting thing about getting VS Express was that I had to download and install Mozilla Firefox in order to access the website! The VS site had enough odd elements that the IE7 browser wouldn't hold still long enough to read what was on the screen. A weird redrawing of bits of the page were occurring, as if the browser would draw the background image under some text, obscuring the text, forcing the text to be refreshed, which then obscured the background, forcing that to be refreshed... Worked dandy in Firefox.

I'm trying to give this configuration a Microsoft run, though, so I'll hold off Firefox use until I can't do something in IE.

The Vista beta expires in May 2007, and the Office beta in February, so long enough to get a feel for it and decide if it's worth upgrading.

I do have a spare 18GB partition on the AMD64, so I'll probably put the 64-bit version of Vista there to test. I'm a little worried about loosing the boot loader as I do use that machine's LINUX installation more than I do the Windows, but we'll just see how that goes. I can always repair the LINUX as long as the root partition (or /home partition) aren't destroyed.