On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 02:25 +1200, Russell McMahon wrote:
> >From another list
> 
> Subject: [AR] Windows Vista Public Download
> 
> 
> Want to try life on the bleeding edge and be a guinea pig for Microsoft?
> 
> Didn't think so :-)
> 
> But for those brave few who do now is the time to get in case they decide to 
> cap the test program at some point...

Yup, downloaded it last week and gave it a try (just to see what the
competition is up to). 

I'm not very impressed. It's very "pretty", and there are some neat
additions, but there are also some VERY annoying additions. A good
example is the "are you sure you want to continue" prompt whenever you
do something to the registry. I understand why they put it in, and I
even agree it might be necessary, but it sure is bloody annoying when
setting a system up. They better make it easy to turn that off.

I was disappointed with IE7. They tried to pretty it up but at the same
time made accessing things difficult. Favorites are now an expanding
side panel, an infuriating concept to me. Some of the IE7 features are
nice, but I've been using them for years now with other browsers so I'm
not very impressed (tabs, search bar, RSS). Also had ALOT of problems
with websites, many of the "bigger" ones I tried had some minor issues,
some of them had MAJOR issues. Web site operators better get their acts
together or else alot of Vista users will be ticked off.

As for Windows itself, the "gadgets" are nice, but again, something I've
had for a while. The graphical effects are "pretty", but not really
useful.

The image viewer is very nice, and I haven't fully played with the
video/DVD maker stuff (I've heard burner support isn't available yet?).

Hardware performance is a major issue, you NEED good hardware to run
Vista at a speed anywhere NEAR what people are used to with XP. Graphics
performance is the most critical, with memory being a close second. Good
for me since I work for a big graphics company... :)

The best part to me is MCE is included, it really is a good piece of
software and I'm glad to see it included with at least one trim level of
Vista (not sure which levels will have MCE included).

In the end though, I really got the feeling that Vista isn't that
special. Ya it looks pretty, and there are some neat additions, but it's
nowhere near the kind of change we experienced going from Win3.11 to
Win98. My boss commented that it really feels like XP with just a
different desktop theme, and I'd have to agree.

It is only a beta, so perhaps things will improve, but as it is now I
don't see any reason to pay to upgrade from XP.

For a person who's only used XP and IE the changes are more pronounced,
and I can see a level of excitement could be built up. But for me, a
user of Firefox and modern Linux distros I'm not really seeing anything
that new.

TTYL

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